NEW: WhatsApp will soon make it possible to chat with people who use other messaging apps. It's revealed some more details on how that will work.
— Apps will need to sign an agreement with Meta, then connect to its servers.
— Meta wants people to use the Signal Protocol, but also says other encryption protocols can be used if they can meet WhatsApp's standards
— WhatsApp has been testing with Matrix in recent months, although nothing is agreed yet. Swiss app Threema says it won't become interoperable
@mattburgess thank you for making clear this crucial bit:
> It isn’t a shift entirely of WhatsApp’s own making. In September, European, lawmakers designated WhatsApp parent Meta as one of six influential “gatekeeer” companies under its sweeping Digital Markets Act, giving it six months to open its walled garden to others. With just a few weeks to go before that time is up, WhatsApp is detailing how its interoperability with other apps may work.
@mattburgess Signal want to control all clients accessing their servers. They don't want to be an open protocol network, so this won't actually allow federation between Meta and Signal users.
Which means that, now, Meta / Facebook will be able to analyze your social tree even better.
As a reminder, metadata - in other words who is talking to who - is sometimes just as important (if not more) than knowing what they said to each other.
"Hey, I sent you that WhatsApp"
"yeah what was that about?"
"I used a new function in WhatsApp"
"but I'm not using WhatsApp, I'm using <insert different app here>"
"oh, that's inconvenient. Can you maybe just switch to WhatsApp instead?"
Interoperability barely works when all parties have common goals and good intentions. I do not assume meta to have good intentions.
@mattburgess wait, how are they going to get into an agreement with Matrix (service) when Matrix (organization) isn't in control of Matrix instances? :thonking:
@alper@mattburgess iMessage is automatically "compatible" with every other smartphone because of autofallback to SMS/MMS. So I can't imagine that the EU would want to force anything here. Or am I missing something? 🤔
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