Conversations on Instagram and Facebook Messenger are interrupted

Meta has begun to differentiate the ability to have “cross-app conversations” with your Instagram contacts via Facebook Messenger and vice versa.

In 2020, Meta – and then “Facebook” – to announce It has linked its Messenger experience with Instagram, giving the latter platform an enhanced chat experience and ensuring its users “have access to the best messaging experience, no matter which app they use.” Both apps allow you to stay in touch with your Facebook friends and Instagram contacts. To do this, you must “upgrade” the messaging experience

Three years later, the company now appears to be making a U-turn on integration. loud new Support pageCross-app chat between Messenger and Instagram will no longer be available from “mid-December 2023”. The company explains what changes when the feature is disabled:

• You cannot initiate new conversations or calls from Instagram using a Facebook account.
• All your conversations with Facebook accounts will be read-only This means that you and others in this chat cannot send new messages.
• Facebook account cannot be seen Your activity status Or whether you saw a message.
• Any existing conversations you have with a Facebook account will not be transferred to your Facebook or Messenger inbox.

No reason was given for this change, but it may be related to the European Digital Markets Act (DMA), which, among other things, requires large companies to provide interoperability between messaging platforms. Another meta product, WhatsApp, is already available Set up third-party chat features. This will help with DMA compliance.

It’s possible that Meta will introduce the service’s cross-app chat feature to better prepare for greater, DMA-compliant interoperability within Messenger. Alternatively, this could be another example of Meta Messenger scaling back, as the app recently lost SMS/MMS functionality on Android and discontinued Meta Messenger Lite.

Thanks, Kevin!