Instagram private messages soon accessible from Threads?

We’re still waiting for X.com’s competing service to allow us to chat privately. However, to keep its promises, Meta will have to tinker a little.

By seeking to shape Twitter according to his own convictions, Elon Musk has sparked the awakening of the social media giant at the head of Facebook and Instagram. However, once revealed, Threads proved to be somewhat incomplete, and the service still needs to add features to truly aspire to supplant its competitor.

Among these, the appearance of private messaging is eagerly awaited by users, and it could well arrive in the months to come, but not without compromise.

Five very explicit lines of code

Adam Mosserie, the mastermind behind Threads, has many plans for the young social network, and he does not hesitate to share them with us regularly. If he still promises us integration within ActivityPub, he also spoke on the subject of private messaging. Should we create a separate one for the micro-blogging service, at the risk of being redundant, or rather integrate that of Instagram?

For the moment, the second option seems to be favored, as evidenced by a small piece of code spotted in the latest update of the Threads application on Android. In his version 315.0.0.29.109we can actually find the following:

For those who are allergic to computer languages ​​and the language of Shakespeare, here’s what we can take from all this: Threads may well be able to display private messages exchanged on your Instagram account. At least that’s what these lines of code suggest, but other questions still remain, and not just any questions.

The difficult existence of a platform that wants to be located between the ecosystems of Instagram and Mastodon

For Mosserie, the appearance of Instagram messages on Threads, which we recently tested, would not be without difficulties. This could lead to a “ notification routing quirk ”, in the case where the two applications report the same new message in turn. Meta could solve this problem by not allowing its microblogging platform to display notifications related to private conversations, for example. But, what would it be like for those who don’t have Instagram installed on their device?

Messaging could also be less comprehensive on Threads, by not integrating all the features available on its sister platform, or by only allowing messages to be displayed, before sending users back to the latter to reply or react. Which would only increase the already very strong link between the two platforms.

The latter solution would make even more sense in a world where Meta’s microblogging platform integrates the ActivityPub protocol. Indeed, the latter is far from being able to support messages exchanged via Instagram, and it would perhaps be strange, even confusing, to have to deal with an application compatible with two different ecosystems without them being able to directly interact with each other. the other. However, this would not be impossible.

Let’s see how the American giant will fare.

Source : Android Authority