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09/30/2020

Facebook Merges DMs for Instagram and Messenger

A new update allows for cross-platform messaging

One of the last major firewalls standing between Facebook’s family of apps is no more: Starting today, Instagram users can message people on Facebook and vice versa. How? Messenger, the Facebook-owned messaging app, has slid into Instagram’s DMs. An update replaces direct messages on Instagram with Messenger, which will be embedded inside the app. No need to download the Messenger app separately, as the Facebook app still requires; no need to link your Facebook account or even have a Facebook account at all.

The update is a significant step toward a vision laid out by Mark Zuckerberg last year of knitting together the messaging systems on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which between them have over 2.6 billion users. “We want to give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer,” the CEO wrote at the time. In addition to convenience, he touted the security and privacy advantages—namely, end-to-end encryption, which has been the default on WhatsApp since 2016.

End-to-end encryption is also part of what makes merging the platforms so tricky. Facebook engineers told WIRED earlier this year that making encryption the default on Messenger will take years—and so, by extension, will a full integration of all three apps.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.

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