Matt Blaze
Periodic reminder that the "Direct Message" / "Private Mention" function here is dangerously broken with confusing semantics.
- Anyone mentioned *anywhere* in the body of a PM gets a copy.
- "Disabling" PMs in your profile merely means YOU never see messages sent to you; senders can still send them, with no error indication.
- Nothing is encrypted, which means administrators on any instance that processes a message can see them.
I strongly recommend using something else for private messages.
Matt Blaze
I find it tragically hilarious that half the responses to this are "thanks, I had no idea" and the other half are people telling me the way it works is perfectly clear and there's no problem.
Matt Blaze
Apparently the late Douglas Adams works here.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Matt Blaze
I get that there are some people who fully understand the semantics of PMs here. Give yourselves a gold star.
But not everyone is as smart, well informed, and generally good looking as you are. The rest of us slobs can get tripped up by complex, confusing semantics like this, sometimes in ways that might cause us real harm.
Akhenatobi & Meritaten etc.
@mattblaze I don’t quite understand because I’ve not known there was a way to send a direct message on the iOS… so if someone had a different way to Mastodon & sends me one, it just shows up on the feed with everything else I think. I’m gen x… so I appreciate you explaining it like I’m five here. 🙏🏼
hayden aiken ?????
@mattblaze understanding this is something I definitely take for granted
Suzanne Aldrich (she/her)
@mattblaze It's so crazy to me how badly this was designed. It pretty much fits nobody's conception of what a "direct message" or "private mention" could possibly mean. How is this feature supposed to be useful? Did nobody attempt to plot out how it might get used or thought about by users? #UXFail #DesignFailures
Matt Blaze
@suzannealdrich It violates well understood usability and safety design principles (e.g., least surprise). Just a trash fire.
sleepysaf
@mattblaze @suzannealdrich And yet i still somehow meet people who think it makes perfect sense and is intuitive.
idgi
maisylover
@mattblaze agreed. I don’t understand why this pseudo-DM feature was even implemented in the first place. It poses serious safety and security concerns, which means if you don’t do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all. Love the mastodon devs but this isn’t okay!
Jim Vernon
@benjamincodes @mattblaze There is no "Direct Message" feature in Mastodon. You have the option to post something with the privacy level set to "Only mentioned people". That seems pretty straight forward. You mention people, they can see the toot. It doesn't claim to be a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging system. In fact, Mastodon specifically warns you of this when you change the privacy setting to "Only mentioned people". The feature is just for when you want to limit who you're interacting with when posting, perhaps to continue a conversation without public visibility.
Matt Blaze
@jimvernon @benjamincodes Not everyone is as smart, well-informed, or attractive as you are, and may not find it to be as "straight forward" as you do.
Jim Vernon
@mattblaze @benjamincodes I'm not trying to offend. I just don't understand where the confusion comes from. The UI says what it's going to do and it says it in three words: "Only mentioned people". There doesn't seem to be a lot there to get confused about, so I'm wondering what I'm missing that's confusing some people. I assume the Mastodon devs would be wondering the same thing if they saw your post.
Matt Blaze
@jimvernon @benjamincodes Look up "principle of least surprise". It's an important usability and safety design paradigm that the PM function here quite clearly violates.
Yes, it's possible for smart people like you to understand the semantics of PMs if they study the code or documentation carefully. That doesn't make it a safe or usable design.
Jim Vernon
@mattblaze @benjamincodes Are you using the official Mastodon client or a third party one? I'm seeing that two of the third party clients I have installed say "Direct" instead of "Only mentioned people" like the official client says. That does seem like it would confuse people.
Matt Blaze
@jimvernon @benjamincodes It's possible that I'm just not very smart. But I suspect the people who responded with "thanks for the warning - I had no idea" can't *all* be as dumb as I am.
Matt Blaze
@jimvernon @benjamincodes Frankly, it looks to me like the semantics of PMs were based on "what's easy to implement with the current architecture" rather than "what do people want/expect".
Michael Miller :blobrdm: 🦆
@mattblaze @jimvernon @benjamincodes you could save a lot of words with this argument by just saying “don’t use mastodon for private discussions”, which, of course, should extend to *any and all social networks*
Every time I see this argument it starts with the straw-man of Twitter DMs and pastes it on top of Mastodon, without acknowledging any of the efforts already made to mitigate the problem. So then every thread devolves into the same discussion where the straw-man is picked apart.
Matt Blaze
@raineer @jimvernon @benjamincodes Yes, I think the PM mechanism is dangerous and poorly understood. I don't understand why people take it personally when I warn people away from it, as I did here. Perhaps it would be more productive to make it work the way people expect it to.
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