#mastondon Friends!

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@virtuous_sloth @evan

This is what I meant that there are lots of things to look at here. As Evan points out, let's make PMs actually something distinct and clearly not a message. Too many people either think something is a PM and it isn't or it is, and it shows up in your feed which makes people panic!

So many simple things to clean up here.

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@grahamperrin Oh I plan to! But it helps to have a conversation first so I know WHAT to put into the poll...

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@benpate Could not agree with you more! Do you have any ideas on how to improve threads? Any products that do it well for example? Branching threads are a bit like merging PRs, the dependency tree can get crazy complex!

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@Rycaut Exactly. My hypothese is that most PMs are scoping outisde of the public discourse and are not in need to encryption. This doesn't mean it's not a good long term goal! Just saying lots of usage does not require it

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@morst No one is saying encryption is off the table. Just that I wanted to start with low hanging fruit (bucause the improvements are so much easier. Others are working on the encryption (it's a VERY hard problem)

[fwaaron@social.coop]

@scottjenson
Seems like another way to ask what you're getting at is "would you consider improvements to private mentions useless without encryption?"

My answer to that would be no. There are plenty of other options for encrypted messaging.

[hugovk@mastodon.social]

@scottjenson Please make UX improvements first. Adding complex encryption won't make a difference when people accidentally send a public toot thinking it's private.

[thomas@metalhead.club]

@scottjenson encryption is not trivial. Focus on the basics and get them nice and convenient. Then try to solve the encryption puzzle :)

[utzer@f.utzer.de]

@scottjenson encryption not needed, I use a safe messenger if I need that.

[aymm@metalhead.club]

@scottjenson I think encryptef messages are important, but I also think that lower-hanging fruit (e.g. improved UX) should be done first

[jochenwolters@mastodon.social]

@scottjenson Thanks for the thoughtful response, Scott. I sincerely appreciate that! And I agree with everything you write.

Here's a little IxD detail in Mona 6 that's I find very useful. I hardly use the official Mastodon clients. So if they lack such a reminder, adding it should be a fairly minor effort with a huge upside in terms of setting the accurate security expectations with users.

[bigfood@social.tchncs.de]

@scottjenson
I'm not here for encrypted messaging.

[eelcoa@mastodon.nl]

@scottjenson I hardly use DM, so wouldn't care if it wouldn't be encrypted.

[dialecticalmusings@app.wafrn.net]

There’s a deadly footgun embedded in Mastodon’s “private mentions”—any account that is @ mentioned receives the message, even when they are not the intended recipient. For an example of how this plays out, check out the “Direct messaging does not work” section in this April 2025 blog post.

Referring to someone using @ mentions is part of the muscle memory of Mastodon users. (Convenience plays a major part, @ mentions provide autocomplete options once you type in a few characters.)

In the past, Eugen Rochko had defended this as behaviour that a user should expect. In other words, he considers this behaviour a sane default. Maybe. (A completely different UI paradigm only for “private mentions” will be tricky, it will go against user expectations—I understand that.)

But in that case, I think enabling end-to-end encryption for “private mentions” is kinda pointless.

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@dialecticalmusings Thank you. This has been mentioned by others as well. I can see how this behavior could be problematic.

[scottjenson@social.coop]

@jochenwolters Agreed! These are the type of fixes I'd like to consider IN ADDITION to continuing to work on backend encryption

[jak2k@mastodontech.de]

@scottjenson Any UX improvement would be great.

Maybe it is possible to integrate something like XMPP or MLS later for encrypted DMs? They could both federate too.

[fogoplayer@mastodon.world]

@scottjenson I think all of these ideas stem from how, on every other platform, DMs are a fundamentally different "thing" than posts. I worry that a dedicated interface and separate notifications reinforce that expectation away from the technical reality. They make private mentions look more like DMs, but they still don't act like it. So then when those posts aren't encrypted, or you tag someone and they get a notification about it, you're even more surprised.

[anctreat5358@mindly.social]

@scottjenson A UI change first would go a long way in alerting you if you break your intended private mention by including more than 1 at sign or any hashtags. This can be a source of great angst.

[gracjan@mastodon.online]

@scottjenson I think that every message not meant as a public broadcast should be end-to-end encrypted, regardless of the app or service that people use to send it. People shouldn’t have to worry if the information they’re exchanging is private and secure or not. It should be table-stakes these days, just like HTTPS is for websites. When you create a website, you don’t ask yourself if it’s sensitive enough to need it, it’s just common practice to generate an HTTPS certificate for everything.