As an European, Classic Macs (and current ones) were just for arts/writting people. If you knew what CMYK was in order to print a newspaper, you were a Mac user.

I emulated Mac OS 7 under XP times, and i was impressed that you could get far faster speeds emulating the M68k (and partially the PPC) compared to Intel X86 without any hardware accelerating chip (IntelVT) or kernel modules trapping X86 instructions running it at native speeds. I mean, PPC and M68k chips where much easier to emulate than X86 on itself.

On software, Classic Mac users can just resort to IRC and Gopher clients and visit the public https://bitlbee.org IRC servers in order to connect 'modern' accounts and being proxied to a Mac IRC client. And for Gopher, you have gopher://hngopher.com, gopher://magical.fish and the like. Sadly you don't have an easy TLS library as Amiga users have (AmiSSL) where even modern web can work on it (and IRC over TLS, Gemini...).

Altough... if Amiga m68k emulators run fast with the Rosetta like tech for PPC... you would just fire up Workbench and then AmiSSL. Crude, but it would work. If not, here in the Apple subdir you can get, maybe, some TLS enabled browsers:

gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn

and

gopher://happymacs.ddns.net/1Vintage-Mac-Software-Archive

MacSSL:

https://github.com/demoniccode12/MacSSL

Usenet will work fine without any TLS, and there's tons of content out there.