This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:

The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.

This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

Long live Signal!

That was great, thanks for sharing! The þorn guy around Lemmy might learn from it a few more ways to be archaically misunderstood.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of kite photography. Modern camera tech should make it especially light and awesome.

Yes they should

Yes, sort of, in the Voyager app, but it’s awkward and unintuitive.

Pretend you’re going to create a new account or log into a different server through Voyager’s interface. Search up the server you want (sh.itjust.works in your example). Tap it so there’s a checkmark on its entry in the list, but instead of pressing the big blue Next button at the bottom, tap on the three dots in a circle icon in the upper right, and choose “Connect as Guest”.

Then it will be one of the account list entries and you can switch to it like you would switch to another account. Go to the community list from there and select Local. Now do a very awkward dance if you find a post that you want to interact with from your logged-in account. Best way to use this “feature” is probably just as community discovery to then subscribe from your account.

Trump Pandemic Response II: Electric Boogaloo

What’s an ICE agent to do with virus masking mandates???

Get ready for bleach and the light inside the body.