It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you're not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.

Not that I'm aware of, never even knew it was ever a requirement. I've only used the android client and the browser client. For whatever reason they don't really communicate the browser is out there for use. It's chat.beeper.com for anyone looking.

Nice, that certainly helps giving these initial community imports some "life."

I figured out my lack of community posts was due to rapidly tearing down and re-deploying my piefed stack on the same domain. I think some federation began prior to the tear-down-then-re-deploy, so when the latest iteration began federating there were invalid signature errors for most activities since a new key was introduced. Result was a bunch of communities with no posts.

It would be nice to have some more targeted community import options as this thing matures. Something like an admin input for backfill value on the bulk import operations, or the option to to give a backfill value when doing specific community imports.