META to move to ActivityPub
Building on the tremendous success of its own platform, the company is going to expand its acclaimed services to "decentralized" ActivityPub. Rumor has it they are going to call it "faketoot", in order to honor the company's illustrous past.
In order to protect my sources, I am not going to give any reference to support my claims, so feel free to believe it or not. I have heard that the project codename is "P94" or "SWANSONG23", or something along these lines.
I am a translator!
WhatsApp was built on XMPP and, after some time during which federation was possible, it wasn't possible anymore. I guess we should expect the same here.
I am personally a bit lost in these "social networks". I use Mastodon to sometimes get intersting information but it is public posting only. What are the options for decentralized things based on ActivityPub that could be used to share things with a limited group of people?
I would think that the difference is that XMPP was not very popular, unfortunately, when Whatsapp and Hangouts hijacked it. ActivityPub has arguably a broader appeal, and this time the corporations are just going to join too late, and most probably to die on the spot, like stranded whales.
I believe an answer to your question could be to send private messages through Mastodon, GNU Social or Libervia (beta). This does not mean that they are dedicated to private communications, though, so that spot is arguably still better served by XMPP. Maybe XMPP just needs its Musk moment to become more visible as the appropriate alternative to the corporate disservices. Not everything can be optimally served by a single protocol.