Just saw your edit and comments to others and something really doesn’t make sense. “East Seattle near I-90” is basically either Mount Baker or Leschi. Both of those are primarily neighborhoods without much in the way of businesses and mostly comprised of houses rather than apartments. It’s also a rather expensive area, since it’s in central-Seattle and right on the lakefront. I have a hard time believing that there’s a company in that part of town that’s big enough to relocate a candidate. Did you perhaps mean the Eastside instead? That’s a very different thing. The Eastside is everything east of Lake Washington and is outside of the Seattle city limits. The Eastside near I-90 would be south-central Bellevue (Factoria and Eastgate area) and Issaquah. There are large companies and quite a lot of places to live near there. Recommendations for where to rent on the Eastside near I-90 will be very different than recommendations for where to rent in Central (or East) Seattle. The Seattle metro area is split in two by Lake Washington, and while it’s possible to bike across the I-90 floating bridge (I have a coworker who does), it’s probably not going to be done in less than 45 minutes and is probably going to be rather unpleasant for part of the year.

It really would be helpful if you gave us a better idea of where you’ll be commuting to (like, the cross-streets, or the name of the neighborhood, or a nearby landmark, or the name of the company if you’re willing to reveal that info – lots of us in this area have worked for the major tech companies or have friends who have, and know where all their campus buildings are), as well as what your budget is. Budget is really crucial since rent varies a lot based on location. For instance, doing a quick search it looks like average rent in Factoria is about $1800 per month. Average rent in Lake Union (where Amazon is) is almost double that at about $3200 per month. And if you think even $1800/mo is expensive then I’ve got some bad news for you about your desire to not commute by car for longer than 1.5 hours.

Idk. I was told to avoid it, unless I like to hear gunshots.

People who say that tend to be people who don’t ever visit Tacoma and don’t know what they’re talking about.
A counterpoint is this article that came out yesterday, listing Tacoma as the third-best place to live in the country (according to Bankrate.com): https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/tacoma/tacoma-named-best-places-live/281-53273688-2959-4ea0-ad45-46a48331084e

Every big city has crime. The Seattle metro area is safer than most.

Check the unemployment laws in your state. Where I live, “performance issues” isn’t a valid termination reason for denying unemployment, although filing an appeal letter to a judge is necessary to ensure you can collect unemployment in those cases. Each state is going to have different rules though.

What do you consider “expensive”? And like others asked, where are you going to be commuting to, and what do you consider “too far”?
I don’t know if I’d agree with the people on Reddit who told you to avoid Tacoma. It’s certainly cheaper than living in Seattle itself, if you can deal with the commute time. Also keep in mind that Seattle is one of the safest large metro areas in the country, so pretty much everywhere is “safe” compared to other large cities.

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author’s points, that’s not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn’t really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn’t provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they’re in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don’t go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

It’s a matter of personal independence and speed. If I’m at a gas station to fill up then I’m not making progress in getting where I want to be going. I know what grade of gas I want put in my car, I know how the pumps operate, and I can generally fuel my car faster than going through the back-and-forth process of dealing with an attendant. Of course, I’ve also only lived in places where self-service was the norm, so I’m very used to pumping my own gas. Whenever I drive down to visit my sister in Portland I always try to fill up across the river in Washington just so I don’t have to deal with the mandatory full-service in Oregon.