So I'm sure by now people who are leading-edge tech enough to have investigated/joined Mastodon are aware that DMs, despite being labeled as such, are not only viewable by system admins, but can be unprivated. Yesterday I learned that if you mention an account in a DM, it PULLS THEM INTO YOUR CONVERSATION. It appears they can't see what was said before, but they def see what transpires after!
It's not a bug, because it's working as it was laid out in the feature/acceptance requirements. And the fact that this is not a bug indicates there is a huge, huge gap in how gargron/Eugen Rochko and other Mastodon code contributors understand typical user behavior/expectations.
It's absolutely fucking disingenuous people are saying "Then don't talk shit!" There are plenty of reasons why people would want/need to mention an account that isn't shit-talking. Maybe they're warning somebody about a bad actor or harasser, or giving a heads-up somebody they find annoying has switched accounts/instances so they can block them. They might be a scammer. To think this is in any way acceptable for a modern website, especially one that people are positioning as a Twitter alternative, is genuinely baffling and alarming.
How do you cultivate sources as a journalist on a site where messages are inherently insecure and vulnerable to snooping? Pray that everybody else has WhatsApp or Signal and is willing to follow you to another platform? There are so many sources of friction that will degrade the UX of this platform/protocol/wev that don't need to be there.
But Alice, you say, there has never been an expectation of privacy on any social media site! Twitter doesn't encrypt DMs end to end! No, but Twitter also doesn't have enough damn time to snoop in your DMs, which is not necessarily the case for some bored instance admin. And certainly it does not snitch-tag in a private quote retweet/DM as expected behavior.
The more I find out about how Mastodon functions, the clearer it is that it is a site written by people who absolutely do not understand how most people's minds work, and we found this out too late because there wasn't enough of a critical mass of normies (descriptive not derogatory) to kick the tires first.