Podcasting Chat Community

@neal OOOOOh, that's a cool point! Thank you. What are you suggesting, that PMs are ONLY 1:1?

@mattwilcox My issue is simple: Should Mastodon replace Signal? Given how good it is, I'm trying to understand it's place in the world vs ours?

@mattwilcox all fair points!

@crackhappy @phillycodehound Kind of where I'm coming from. I'm making this point a bit "in the open" not to say any decision is made, but to see if I'm missing something important.

@jarango bingo, now you know what I'm kind of making a strong point to get a feeling about how strongly people actually feel about this.

My point is that encrypted communication is very valuable, but it's usage is quite distinct from microblogging. I'm trying to understand who needs it WITHIN Mastodon (vs just switching to an app that specializes in and likely will do a better job if I'm honest)

@asmaloney @phillycodehound Fair enough, but there are other encrypted messaging apps other than Signal yes?

@stefan
That's interesting! But it kind of begs the question how you're using encrypted communication. I get that you can launch this Germ app from within Bluesky as a convenience, that's cool, but if you're REALLY using encrypted communication, you're not going to be using it exclusively from Bluesky.

Others have said it but I'm thinking the venn diagram of people that need encrypted messaging (which is huge and valid) is quite distinct from people that need private mentions on a microblogging platform.

@phillycodehound

@jarango My thinking exactly. My concern is that there are some peolple that really want it and I'm trying to suss out how important it is to them (and why) What I'm getting so far from this thread is quite the opposite.

@jarango exactly! For me PMs are a convenience. I don't personally need it. But there are folks working on it in a FEP but my understanding is that it is fediverse wide not just Mastodon (as it should be!)

Given how hard it'll be to do this I'll like to clean things up and not wait for the more secure option (especially if most use cases don't require it)

@neal yes! Good point. We already do PMs however so we'd start with fixing these

@earth2marsh I'm not sure I follow, can you explain this default posture a bit more and what you'd like to see a bit more?

#mastondon Friends!

There is a TON of improvements we could make to Private Mentions (often called DMs on other platforms) e.g.
* getting them out of the public timeline
* Having a stronger notification tied to the Private Mention tab
* (amount other things)

But here is my MAIN question: How critical is it that these message are encrypted? I'm not against encryption! It's just complex and will take time. If we were to make some UX changes as a first pass WITHOUT encryption would you be OK with that (at least for now?)

If you MUST have encryption, that's fine, please do me the favor of replying explaining why you need it.