Spam (like the torrent of cryptoscamspam lots of people got this morning) has been very rare for me here (and dealt with quickly), but I've noticed that almost all of the spam I've gotten has been via Mastodon's DM feature.
I really wish there was a way to turn DMs off or at least restrict them to people I follow. Control over incoming DMs was a thing Twitter did better than here.
Another way DMs are hopelessly broken: if your handle is mentioned anywhere in a DM, you get a copy.
Yes, I understand why (technically) it might work that way. That doesn't mean it's not broken.
DMs here are a dumpster fire of buggy behavior and non-intuitive semantics.
Broadly, one of the reasons Mastodon DMs are such a mess, I think, is that mixing a private messaging function with a broadcast medium tends to end badly. My students and I explored this mismatch a bit a while back.
Everything is also extra hard because we have to start where we are, rather than being able to build something new that works “correctly” (whatever we might decide is correct).
Concretely, I’m fairly sure that it’s easier to start with an e2ee system and add more public features than to start with a public system and try to lock it down. UX aside there’s little difference between a Matrix room with only one person authorised to post to it, and that person’s activitypub feed. Adapting a client to preset the “right” UX would be relatively easy.
Pretty much anything is easy relative to getting everyone to adopt a new social medium though.
Matt Blaze
Andrew Aylett