I guess they're trying to find ways to boost their FB DAU. The new facebook.com/messenger shows you FB notifications of course.
Continued enshittification at Meta. I don't care about privacy/encryption for my group chats and neither do a lot of people. Messenger was the last good, reliable, and fully cloud based messaging solution that most everyone was on.
Amazing that in 2026 there is not a single good messaging app. Whatsapp/Signal storing everything on device and going by phone number. is dumb and annoying. I've lost dozens of chats/photos/videos due to phone number changes, phone changes, ect. iMessage is terrible, full of spam and constant bugs/lack of feature parity on the Mac App, not to mention that half of my friends cant use it. All others have many of the same problems or just aren't used by that many people.
If you have a FB account, then that URL they give will work in your web browser. If you don't have an FB account or you deactivated it, and you only use Messenger, the mobile apps will be the only way forward.
What a joke.