In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
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.
I live in Germany and everyone here uses WhatsApp. If you decide to uninstall it, you’re cut off from 95% of your friends, family and your coworkers.
It’s not an option to not use it, sadly. From what I understand, it’s like iMessage in the USA. Extreme monopoly and very hard to break out of it.
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.
It’s not as easy as you make it sound. Between 2015 and 2022, Whatsapp’s marketshare has increased a lot in Germany. So it might’ve been comparatively easy to drop it 8 years ago. It’s not anymore.
Maybe I’d be able to convince a lot of my friends to install another app just for me. But it would be hard to do and involve a lot of arguing on my end. I’m not a missionary and I choose to spend my lifetime for other, more important things.