Anyway, while I don't understand why this pisses some people off so much, or why they take my critique of the Mastodon PM semantics so personally, it's now very clear that it does piss some people off quite a bit.

But I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm an expert on security and privacy. And my job is, in large part, to act as a public intellectual. Warning people of dangerous designs that could cause them harm is what I do. If doing so makes me an asshole, so be it.

It's sometimes difficult to remember that communications platforms, including social media platforms like this one, attract a very wide variety of users with a wide range of circumstances. The same systems we might use only for trivial chitchat are likely also being used by political dissidents, labor organizers, and others for whom mistakes can have very serious consequences.

Making social media platforms reliably usable is important, even if it might not seem so to us personally.

Twitter was, of course, a repeated example of this. It was never *intended* to be a tool for dissidents or for organizing protests. But within a few years of its introduction, that became a major secondary function of the platform, in the US as well as in some very repressive regimes. It happened to meet the needs of these communities, and they just started using it in ways its designers never specifically anticipated.

Design as if your users' lives might depend on your choices.