If you're not doing it via your own domain, I don't think it matters much. Half the people you email are on gmail anyways so you'll never break free fully. So you can stay with Proton if you wanted to. I feel icky about them so I personally wouldn't give them any money.
But there are also providers like Tuta that offer European hosted email services. I haven't heard anything bad about Tuta.
In terms of word processing? No. That's why I do it on notes. Look into Nextcloud as a solution to do calendars, contacts, cloud storage, and notes to de-googlefy.
If you are looking for a free alternative, you're not going to like it. If you're lucky, you'll find a service hosting OnlyOffice for you with cloud storage, which will suffer from not having the worldwide server capacity of an American tech giant.
I'd sooner investigate if you can deal with not editing documents much on the go and going for LibreOffice on a computer. It's the solution I went for. If you have a service that hosts notes in the cloud for you, I found that to be enough to draft something, which I can turn into a document when necessary.
Somebody suggested Proton. They are not a big as Google. Their services work alright. But where Google used to be "don't be evil," Proton's motto seems to be "be daft." Examples range from praise for the 47th administration in the US, selling email users out to the authorities, and most recently sponsoring questionable YouTube content. They want to be your Google replacement for everything and going with them is rapidly turning into "out of the Google frying pan, into the Proton frying pan." Plus, they aren't exactly cheap if you ask me.
LibreOffice have recently announced they were going back to developing a cloud version. This situation might get better in the future.
"We will change the law" means they haven't changed it yet. And this PM is so god damn popular in his own party, they are just trying to get his possible replacement in in an otherwise unnecessary byelection. This sounds decisive but isn't a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. The tech big guns will sound amenable to such a policy but will do fuck all.
I can count people who love so-called AI in my circle of friends on one hand. One hand that suffered a near catastrophic accident at the saw mill.
The "town square" is former Xwitter marketing to give it relevance, which you could say it had until the son of South African emerald miners got involved. It was due to especially media types being fond of that platform. News broke there, hashtags trended, movements started. That's gone now.
Lemmy isn't that. It's a fediverse place to find mostly niche content for people who got fed up with reddit.
I've only been on Lemmy for a few days but ...
You're on the fediverse. You are your own algorithm. What you see is what you chose to follow or what's on the instance you signed up to. Either way, you ended up there by choice. If this is a thing you notice after only a few days, you are not qualified to predict the doom and gloom of Lemmy. Work on your feed first.
You'll find biased communities on here. You'll find reasonable ones. But you need to go look for them. It's just as echo-chambery here like anywhere else on the internet.
Even for a non-bank website, I imagine there is an octogenarian federal judge somewhere in the States who is still puzzled by fax machines who made a ruling holding website owners liable if they didn't do this when they know of any vulnerability that could affect the user. So there is a possible legal angle as well.
The people who use browsers other than the ones listed will either never see this message or know how to upgrade on their own.
I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can't go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit's complicated.)
That being said I'm sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.
A protocol is a set of rules that a group of people have agreed on to make it easier to talk to each other. I shut up when you talk and listen to what you say. I speak again when you have finished and then it's your turn to listen. That's a simple example of a protocol.
IP is more rules than that but it allows computers to talk to each other without having to exchange contract information first, like people do with phone numbers.
Let that sink in before you tackle Activity Pub.
Because they'd be much bigger and much, much more expensive. And because they don't run as stably as conventional ones. Yet.
This isn't final. Google has time to appeal. Let's hold off on the label "landmark" until it reaches legal effectiveness. Which it probably won't, however good a verdict by a German regional court, much less one based in Bavaria, this is in my opinion.
Google lawyers arguing in court that Google's so-called AI results are shit anyways and people should know it is chef's kiss.