I mean… I come from the forum scene and they were always called PMs, as in Private Message. What in the hell does DM stand for and when did things change from people calling them PMs to DMs.
I mean… I come from the forum scene and they were always called PMs, as in Private Message. What in the hell does DM stand for and when did things change from people calling them PMs to DMs.
Twitter used Direct Message instead of Private Message because they needed to establish that there is legally no understanding of privacy for DMs, because Twitter will surrender the contents of DMs to law enforcement / government / data collection. Fediverse should also use DM because there is again no guarantee of privacy (and you do not expect there to be).
As if admins of the older forum softwares couldn’t just query the database for anyone’s private messages.
Matrix is the fediverse’s messaging platform. It has end-to-end encryption, so you do actually have a guarantee of privacy.
There are DMs on lemmy and they are not using Matrix. Matrix’s security doesn’t matter if you are not actually using Matrix
Why would lemmy not have E2EE for person to person messages?
It’s quite a lot of work to implement. Maybe one day. Same problem on Mastodon
why bother? if you need actual private messaging, you can just use matrix
Privacy is improved when it is there by default
Still, the conversation is private, as in not public. Even if it is surrendered to the authorities, the’ll probably never be released publicly (unless leaked).
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I think I was clear, private as in not public. As in it’s not public domain.
“Public domain” is a copyright term which isn’t really relevant here. The point the other user is trying to make is that, legally speaking, calling something “private” when it very well may be not private is at best disingenuous and at worst a lawsuit waiting to happen.
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And it doesn’t change the fact that only you, the other person and the wiretapper know about that conversation ever happening… well also whoever they might have shared that with as well, but that’s still not public as in someone reading this comment. Everyone can read and confirm that this is what I wrote.
I agree partly with you but…
If the wiretapper releases that conversation and it appears on every TV in the World then it is public and the first thing you are going to say is “but that was a private conversation in a private room and was not meant to be public”. There is expectation of privacy. There is none in a DM. It is a direct message/contact between you, other person and potentially 99999 auditors, and the rest of the world. This is by design, not an exceptional situation.
Yeah, perhaps you’re right… maybe we should just drop the whole PM thing, cuz it makes less sense that calling them DMs.
Yeah, I know, I was just trying to clarify and couldn’t think of another term 🤷.
The truth is, if you share something online, whether it be in a PM or publicly, it can never ever be considered private. However, a PM’s content is harder to get to than reading this comment for example, that was my point.
No you were clear. You are just incorrect. Your “private messages” can be accessed by anyone who works at the site, and are typically scanned for analysis and that data about what you discuss is sold to market researchers.
So they named them direct messages so they couldn’t be accused of false advertisement.
Just because they’re not “public” doesn’t mean they’re “private”.
That is clear… well, at least regarding corporate social media. Admins in the fediverse can read PMs, but why would they, they have no insentive to do that. Hell, I’m still an admin of a forum and I can read all PMs but I have no incentive to do so, I couldn’t care less what people talk about in private.
Still, that doesn’t mean that the content of the conversation is of any interest of the company. The monetization of the converstaion, yes, but the actual converstaion, no.
You thought you were clear, but they’re saying companies didn’t believe it was clear.
I suppose it’s a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not “private” even if it is not publicly available.
Honestly, it doesn’t really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.