I used to get a lot of news off Instagram, but lately I've noticed that a lot of radical stuff like protests have basically disappeared off my feed, and other people I've talked to have said that this is happening with Twitter as well. Now it's mostly just fear-mongering headlines with no reporting on defensive actions, despite there being tons of protests all over the place in the past few days. The 50501 protests were a lot bigger than I thought they'd be, and the fact that there's barely any reporting on them is extremely concerning and I think is intentional. Meanwhile I've seen an increasing amount of radical stuff pop up on RedNote, like protests and pro-Luigi stuff, while at the same time somehow maintaining a calmer and more unifying vibe (also no ads), so it definitely seems like a better platform (compared to other options that are algorithm-driven) and I've been browsing it more instead of Instagram lately. Also, I'm trying to look for ways to connect with more people IRL, which I think is one of the most important things people can do right now to fight the isolating and divisive design of capitalism.
I've been trying to figure out how to network with people where I live and so far it's been very difficult, partly because I'm very busy constantly and don't have a car or a lot of spending money, and also because I'm depressed and my social skills are absolute garbage. At this point almost all of my social life for the past few years has been Lemmy, Reddit, and Instagram.
As a student there is no way I am skipping a day's worth of classes and risking my grade for a single protest that's probably not going to do shit similar to the other protests I've been to that didn't do shit
From what I see here it can automatically encrypt incoming emails with PGP, which I know Fastmail doesn't have this, and the advantage would be that you get security similar to Protonmail but you're not locked into their clients.
Mailbox.org works with IMAP so you can use a regular email program. The mailbox is not encrypted by default but I saw that there's an option to enable it involving PGP keys.
Using AI like Deepseek is a lot easier than shifting through 50 search results, if the question is for a relatively new technology though then it usually doesn't work
They claim to be anarchist and I've seen a lot of users from there criticize Democrats, although they hate Marxists also, so I'm not sure. They're also one of the few instances that federates with Hexbear, but they do block Lemmygrad.
If by "diverse" you mean "has western conservatives", then considering how the entire concept of the fediverse is progressive, you're not going to find many of them here. On Reddit, there's r/AskPolitics which overall leans liberal and is US centric but is more open to discussion than other subreddits. There's some other debate subreddits as well which you might be interested in. They're helpful for developing political views, but after that hearing the same BS from people who have fundamentally different values gets tiring and people leave so that's why there aren't many of those spaces.
If you're open to other viewpoints that are opposed to both Republican and Democrat, leftist instances like lemmy.ml, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and dbzer0 have that, and they can have very different stances on other issues as well (i.e. Lemmygrad vs dbzer0). They can still be echo-chambery (which is hard to avoid) but they also tend to have more users that are interested in intellectual debate.
As far as what instance actually has the most diverse points of view, I'd say lemm.ee which federates with basically everybody and I've seen users there from all over the political spectrum. However, there's isn't much in terms of political discussion there compared to other instances.
I use the FairEmail client