It feels strange to say this in 2019, but one of the biggest tech companies in the world is betting its future on interoperable messaging. In a major announcement on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a shift in focus for Facebook, moving from the News Feed to encrypted, ephemeral messaging — or as he put it, from the town square to the living room. After years of pushing for more data shared with more people, Facebook wants to give users a quiet place to talk.

It’s a fascinating plan for lots of reasons — in part because of the break from Facebook-as-usual — but it’s hard to know what it might look like in practice. The relatively simple part is knitting together the products Facebook already has. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all…

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