I’m curious if this was built off the work Moxie did with them back in the day, but as I recall Facebook Messenger had E2EE built off Signal’s technology a decade or so back, and the zeitgeist back then was at least a little bit less user hostile.

Probably figured they'd ride the wave of E2EE messaging while public popularity crested to draw some conversations (group chats?) onto the platform, just to inevitably rug pull later.

I assume Meta has backdoor access.

Given how few upvotes and comments this submission gets, no one here is surprised at the disappearance of the feature. I guess at 8 May there'll be a higher upvoted submission that better matches the relevance of Meta's move in HN submission history.