PS - Has a mass migration of community from one product to the other ever been successfully pulled off?
PS - Has a mass migration of community from one product to the other ever been successfully pulled off?
You don't need to migrate anything on the short run. The Whatsapp classic experience will probably remain the same for those who prefer the lite messenger, with the added feature of linking a Facebook account and talking to those people too. The heavy and encouraged experience will be Messenger, that already scours the phone book of those dumb enough to use it, and is perfectly positioned to talk to Whatsapp clients.
The massive network effect this move will unlock cannot be ignored by Facebook. I'm sure Whatsapp's privacy features will suffer, but users don't value them.
Tencent did a reasonable job of migrating a lot of people to WeChat from QQ, but then again QQ is also still alive and used, so it wasn't a full/complete migration.