1y ago

Why do people call it DM?

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.

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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.
- Didn’t they also switch the wording from “data protection” to “data usage”?
- 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).
  
  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.
  
  I ran into a person the other day, I wrote "I'll PM you" and he replied "What is PM 🤨" 🤷. They may be young or just a late internet adopter, but still, that was just a sign for me that I should probably adopt the new DM lingo, as some people just don't understand what I'm talking about.
- Fediverse should also use DM because there is again no guarantee of privacy (and you do not expect there to be).
  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
  
  Yes, but when you click the DM button on lemmy.world there's a big red warning telling you to use matrix (element.io) instead.
  
  Matrix is not part of the Fediverse

81 comments