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.
@copito @mattblaze I feel there should be some way for people who meet on here to be able to swap contact info for actually secure/reliable comms, but the problem is that doing that is the same problem as having reliable/secure comms.
The mentioned users only feature seems an ok solution for letting me tell someone my signal/etc without blasting it out for every scraper to see, but it isn't secure
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.
Sometimes it’s really tempting to try to shoehorn one technology into doing something else. If it almost fits, then forcing it to work is fun and satisfying.
Sometimes it’s not the right thing to do.
@mattblaze
a model which has problems in general for a federated forum, I think!
There's a notable suggestion to add a handshake for replies. It doesn't address letting federated users see in advance that their reply will be blocked, but it could let you see your reply has been denied or is waiting approval.
https://queer.af/@erincandescent/110271938380622364
New blog post: **[Right of Reply](https://blog.erinshepherd.net/2023/04/right-of-reply/)**, or: *who should be able to reply to your posts on a social network, and how do we technically enforce that?*
@mattblaze And yet, what's the alternative? How would you privately contact people you only know on Mastodon?
"You don't" is not an answer. Mastodon exists to be used, elegance is optional.
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