The alternative is outright state censored and strictly follows party lines. If you know how to read between the lines you can pick out the bits of actual news that don't make it out through more mainstream sources. Granted, it's still by and large just cult propaganda, but any port in a storm as they say.

Still though, for your own mental health, just use Chinese forums that aren't hosted in China.

As far as cults go, they don't sound like a "literal cult" when reading about them on Wikipedia:

Ian Johnson argued that applying the 'cult' label to Falun Gong effectively "cloaked the government's crackdown with the legitimacy of the West's anticult movement". He wrote that Falun Gong does not satisfy common definitions of a cult: "its members marry outside the group, have outside friends, hold normal jobs, do not live isolated from society, do not believe that the world's end is imminent and do not give significant amounts of money to the organisation ... it does not advocate violence and is at heart an apolitical, inward-oriented discipline, one aimed at cleansing oneself spiritually and improving one's health."[74]: 224  David Ownby similarly wrote that "the entire issue of the supposed cultic nature of Falun Gong was a red herring from the beginning, cleverly exploited by the Chinese state to blunt the appeal of Falun Gong".[63]