Reminder about Mastodon "private" messages. Aside from not being end-end-encrypted (and so visible to instance administrators), they CC anyone @-mentioned ANYWHERE in the body of the message (not just those listed at the start).
They are now called "private mentions" rather than "private messages", but if you don't fully understand the semantics, this behavior may be unexpected and/or cause unpleasant side effects.
Also, if you "turn off" private messages, anyone can still send them to you. They're just silently ignored by your client, without warning to the sender.
Basically, private messages here remain a trainwreck. Use something else if you want to send someone a message privately.
And, of course, people are jumping all over me to defend this crap, the way folks on that other platform defend anything owned by Elon Musk.
Seriously, I think John Mastodon has sufficiently thick skin that he can handle people criticizing or warning about misfeatures and unexpectedly dangerous behavior. He does not need you to defend his honor.
Perhaps if I had the long experience with the Internet that others here apparently do, I'd find Mastodon Private Message semantics more intuitive and sensible. But please forgive me - I'm a relative newcomer, having gotten online only a bit before the migration from net 10 and HOSTS.TXT.
My replies to this thread consist of a set of people saying“Thanks, I didn’t understand that” and another set of people saying “Why did you post this? Everyone understands that already”.
Sounds like something the developers at @Mastodon should hear.
I still haven't used private messages, and after reading you, I'm glad of it.
Yes, I can see warnings, but designing things so people can shoot themselves and then putting warnings is terrible UX.
I totally agree with "private mentions" and end to end encryption. I assume there must be a reason for this mess, but it is a mess, nonetheless.
At least, they should take the word "private" from the name, because that's the most misleading part of those features.
