If you still have a Facebook account, you automatically have a Messenger account. Whether you realize it or not, Messenger is one of the most popular apps in the world. (I only use it to sell all of my personal belongings on the Marketplace, but it has other features.) Here are the best features to activate for more privacy and convenience.
When you tap on your profile picture in the top left corner, the settings menu coming up. You can use this to turn on dark mode for those nighttime messaging sessions. This menu also includes “Active Status”, which you can turn off so that other people cannot see if you are online or the last time you logged in.
Scroll down to ‘Privacy’ and select ‘Message Delivery’. This allows you to customize who can send you messages in the app – just your Facebook friends, anyone with your phone number, etc. You can then decide whether those messages go straight to your inbox as chats or as easy to ignore message requests. Under the “Preferences” section, select “Phone contacts” to manage the information the app gets from your address book.
Once in a chat, click on the other participant’s photo and scroll down to “Go to Secret Conversation.” A new chat will appear with end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages. If you just swipe up during a normal conversation, you can enable “Vanish Mode”, which will still make your messages disappear, but without the added encryption. Note, however: Vanish mode will notify all participants if someone takes screenshots of a chat.