Left and right are artificial, meaningless constructs

Left and right are very useful construct… as a spectrum… on multiple axis.

It just seems completely meaningless, because so much here is tainted by the US perspective. And neither do they have a spectrum (with just two parties), nor multiple axis (again, two parties can’t represent nuanced opinion on different topics). In fact they don’t even have left and right, just right-wing and more far-right.

No, bots aren’t a thing alhough a lot of people pretend them to be. Trolls are still either human or very obviously fake.

Close this tab right now and promise yourself never come back to see if someone gave you an easy answer…

Or maybe you would realize that a lot of people think the same but are also convinced to be alone and unable to change anything… Just like it happened for me back then the moment the first few made the effort to change. We will never know.

I live in Germany

Same here… and most of my contact list (and I) dropped WhatsApp when Meta bought them or a year later when the eavesdropping and phoning home to Meta was publically discussed in the media. The remaining minority is able to use another alternative on top of WhatsApp (that’s one of the reason I like to remond them that they provide Meta with data from the people opting out…). That was also nearly a decade ago (2014/2015), so pretending that you need to use WhatsApp in 2023 is indeed a choice.

I use WhatsApp as well for the people I keep in touch with

And everyone in your address book not using WhatsApp should come by once in a while and slap you for selling their numbers for your convenience… You are right… keeping a basically inactive Facebook profile is harmless in comparison.

You didn’t know because that’s mostly a bullshit pretense. Do you want to know actually happened between Munich going OpenSource and then reverting back to MS? Munich was bribed with a shiny new European Headquarter and the promise of additional taxes.

but will it even be the same now that you know how little control you actually have?

Some communities weren’t even the same anymore after those 48h protests. And you can basically feel which parts of the community instantly left the moment they realized all that talk about protesting was bullshit and it was purely symbolic.