@cheeaun have you thought about separating the UI for sending a direct message from the one for a broadcast post? I know the Mastodon team is planning to do it, but there's no harm in you doing it first.
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@evan I'm not sure which aspect you're referring to. I don't see any separation as long as the there's linkage between broadcast post and non-broadcast post (e.g. I could reply to this with "direct" visibility, and then you could respond with "public" visibility, effectively breaking the entire conversation thread in public 🤣).
Renaming "direct message/mention" to "private mention" by Mastodon feels like a solid first step in the right direction.
@cheeaun I mean, moving the authoring interface.
People often make the mistake of starting a private mention by typing it out, and *intending* to switch the delivery settings to "private mention" before hitting Send.
But they get caught up in their message, and by the time they get to the end they forget to change the delivery settings. So when they hit Send, a possibly sensitive message goes out to the public.
@evan ah ok. I think… that's a solved problem? 🙈 They have to be separate button, UI & flow from the beginning (IG→DM tab, Bsky→Chat, X→Chat, FB→Messenger, Discord→DM tab, Reddit→Chat) — learning from other apps + adapting existing usage patterns and expectations.
Once we have this, we can finally remove "Private mention" from the composer 🤞
@cheeaun making this choice at the beginning rather than the end of the process would make the mistakes less likely. At least, I think so!
@evan @cheeaun An alternative could be that when you start a new message that isn't a reply by tagging someone and you then press "Post" to bring up a quick confirmation whether to post it publicly (or whatever your default visibility is) or send it as a DM instead.
Like how some email clients prompt if you want to attach something before sending if you mention the word "attached" in the email but there's no attachment.