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1. Embed this notice
   Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 00:58:36 JST Rich Felker

   • Neil Brown

   @neil To me the "function" here is ability to communicate privately with someone you've interacted with on the site in question. The rest is a matter of UX and privacy properties.

   Integrated "DMs" might have slightly better UX; that could be improved a lot if OOB private chat systems had better invite link support.

   The privacy properties are where things get really different. The reason I strongly dislike integrated DMs is that the social contract about privacy ("they're private") is grossly mismatched with real capabilities a BOFH might exercise or that the state may force the operator to exercise.

   OTOH OOB links like I proposed have a tendency to leak links between identities, especially since most of these platforms don't let you use private per-interaction subidentities.

   • Embed this notice
     Ret (ret@furry.engineer)'s status on Sunday, 16-Feb-2025 22:01:30 JST Ret

     in reply to

     • Neil Brown

     @dalias @neil in Mastodon at least, there’s a big banner that warns you DMs aren’t encrypted and can be read by the server owner, which I suppose helps to break that down a bit. Other platforms could benefit from that I think.