Agreed. People demand this, acting shocked--SHOCKED!--that this isn't part of the fediverse already.

Oliphantom Menace

"Oh no! Don't use DMs!" they say. "They aren't end-to-end encrypted."

Neither are your DMs on Twitter, or Facebook, or any other social network as far as I'm aware. What makes Mastodon so fucking special to require this, I don't get it.

Also, on Twitter/X, Elon Musk just cracks open your DMs and will send them to Bari Weiss to do a hit piece on you, so you know that shit isn't E2EE there.

Hrefna (DHC) (@[email protected])

This obsession with e2ee in the fediverse just makes no sense to me whatsoever. It's hard to get right—harder still when you have eight million man-in-the-middle vectors who aren't necessarily trusted—and the way we use the protocols today are basically antithetical to the tools you would need for this to work. Sure, there are reasons to want it in at least some form, but if you want _actual e2ee_ and not just "some extra privacy from snooping" then what you want is signal.

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

Robert George 𓇳𓃀𓁹𓏏𓇥𓆓𓀀

@oliphant honestly, I don’t really think we *need* e2ee DMs. But I think we need actual DMs, where you actually address the message to a particular person (or group). The current state of things, “private mentions”, is confusing and also makes it easy to accidentally add (or subtract) participants from the conversation, since the participants need to be explicitly mentioned in each post.

Oliphantom Menace

@rrgeorge I've seen this happen in the wild, where I've created an audience and we're discussing federation with a new server, and someone is like, "Who is the admin of that server" and someone replies with the handle of that admin, and hey, welcome to our conversation, server admin.

Not a big deal in this case, but I can absolutely see how that would be frustrating.

And without Markdown, you can't easily break the handle unless you use spaces.

In other words: @[email protected] used like this won't tag you.