What’s everyone’s opinion on this? Is it a good or bad thing? It’s good, people can ditch WhatsApp and might be easier to convince people to leave it behind altogether. Bad - I can’t imagine that meta do anything without something being in it for them.
Could this potentially help meta scrape information from other messengers?
Could the likes of signal make it optional for the user, whether or not they want to be able to chat across the different messengers…
It’s for the same reason they (half-ass) added ActivityPub support. To avoid legal issues.
There’s also the fact that they’ll suddenly have access to a whole bunch more data.
It’s the same reason I don’t recommend Matrix. You can run your own Matrix server but ultimately 90% of Matrix users are on matrix.org, and all your data ends up on their servers anyway.