When I first got to Reddit a front page post was like 1000 upvotes so Lemmy is approximately sorta the same level of users as when I first got to Reddit
I hope the fediverse attracts enough adoption to make it long term viable. I am making an effort to be here more than there for lemmy/Reddit but YouTube is still harder to quit
Protonmail is fine for searching old emails and they have their own calendar integration. I self host calDAV for my own calendar so I cannot comment on protonmail's other cloud services but I'm happy enough with their email service that I subscribe yearly for it.
That's the downside of not getting data mined, you need to pay for these services. Setting up a private cloud is not impossible for a derp like me but a private email server is definitely well beyond my skillset so that's something I pay for.
I've had like three primary email accounts since the dawn of the popular internet in the 90's
The first was Hotmail because that was a big deal at the time.
The second was google because the interface was slick and it came with (what was at the time) a lot of free storage.
The third is protonmail specifically because after decade+ on Google I realized they pretty much have the keys to the kingdom on my life's data. All my personal relationships and business being filtered through their inbox for a long-ass time. Just because they "know me" inside out for a significant part of my life doesn't mean I gotta just keep feeding them data indefinitely.
Literally just gave up brave for Firefox two weeks ago just for that reason even though brave isn't supposedly gonna be affected. I have no doubt Google might deliberately just break chromium one day once and for all.