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@benjamincodes @mattblaze There is no "Direct Message" feature in Mastodon. You have the option to post something with the privacy level set to "Only mentioned people". That seems pretty straight forward. You mention people, they can see the toot. It doesn't claim to be a secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging system. In fact, Mastodon specifically warns you of this when you change the privacy setting to "Only mentioned people". The feature is just for when you want to limit who you're interacting with when posting, perhaps to continue a conversation without public visibility.

@jimvernon @benjamincodes Not everyone is as smart, well-informed, or attractive as you are, and may not find it to be as "straight forward" as you do.

@mattblaze @benjamincodes I'm not trying to offend. I just don't understand where the confusion comes from. The UI says what it's going to do and it says it in three words: "Only mentioned people". There doesn't seem to be a lot there to get confused about, so I'm wondering what I'm missing that's confusing some people. I assume the Mastodon devs would be wondering the same thing if they saw your post.

@jimvernon @benjamincodes Look up "principle of least surprise". It's an important usability and safety design paradigm that the PM function here quite clearly violates.

Yes, it's possible for smart people like you to understand the semantics of PMs if they study the code or documentation carefully. That doesn't make it a safe or usable design.

@mattblaze @benjamincodes Are you using the official Mastodon client or a third party one? I'm seeing that two of the third party clients I have installed say "Direct" instead of "Only mentioned people" like the official client says. That does seem like it would confuse people.

@jimvernon @benjamincodes It's possible that I'm just not very smart. But I suspect the people who responded with "thanks for the warning - I had no idea" can't *all* be as dumb as I am.

@jimvernon @benjamincodes Frankly, it looks to me like the semantics of PMs were based on "what's easy to implement with the current architecture" rather than "what do people want/expect".