Mastodon DMs on Micro.blog

One of the last missing pieces for Mastodon compatibility was improving DMs, which I rolled out yesterday. We don’t have DMs as a core feature on Micro.blog because I think private messaging needs to be handled very carefully, and not every social network should have its own messaging system. iMessage and Signal are better for this.

DMs just going into the void isn’t good either, though. The compromise we’ve settled on is that when someone from Mastodon sends you a DM, Micro.blog forwards that message to you in email. The email now includes a link to a form for you to send a reply back to Mastodon:

Screenshot of Micro.blog DM reply form.

There is no message history and messages are deleted automatically after 60 days.

Pratik

This is perfectly executed. Love the auto-deleting aspect.

Simon Woods

Nice. I like the ephemeral nature of it.

Paul Robert Lloyd

Oh, that’s smart.

Brandon Trebitowski

beautiful solution.

David G Smith

Would a reply by email be out of the question? Then you could shorten the retention period even more - unless you had abuse concerns, I suppose. And it would lower friction. Authentication concerns perhaps?

Dr. Adam Procter

I have a mastodon account @adamprocter and cross post from MB to it - I also follow some people on mastodon via micro.blog but I can’t @ reply to them in micro.blog if the @ is the first thing in the post. I think I could if I added a mastodon compatible name but that gave me two accounts and confused me if people mentioned me as it depended on the account they mentioned is there anyway to address this? So I can @ a person from MB and cross post that to my mastodon account? At the moment I have to pop into my mastodon client find the conversation I want to contribute to and put the post there. Hope that makes sense.

Pratik

@dgs I rather not expose my email unless I have to. Plus, the conversation might move over to email, which can be archived by the receiver. I used to love that I could delete DMs at my end, and they would disappear for the receiver too. But that may be just me.

Manton Reece

@dgs Reply via email was my first idea too, but it ended up being kind of complicated... Wouldn't rule it out for later, though.

Manton Reece

@adamprocter It makes sense. To reply to Mastodon from Micro.blog, you have to enable the Mastodon-compatible username. This is a technical limitation in the protocol... No way around it.

David G Smith

@pratik Completely agree. Apologies if i was not clear. I was suggesting that an email reply is sent via ggd micro.blog gateway as a DM rather than using a web form. Although i can foresee all sorts of edge cases may prefer to avoid!

David G Smith

Yeah, sitting here with my coffee, I am already glad I don't have to implement it. :)

Dr. Adam Procter

thanks, ok I’m going to keep that off as that became too confusing for me and I like to have my fosstodon account as I support that server and don’t follow everyone from there on MB anyway - took me a while to wrap my head around what I had done when I had it active mind 🤣

Jason Becker

@adamprocter fwiw I cross post to my indieweb.social account and also have my Micro.blog name on. I don't care where someone follows me, and replying in either place gets back to me, and I can reply from whatever someone chooses to follow. I view my Micro.blog Mastodon name as another "feed"-- you can subscribe on MB, via RSS, or via ActivityPub. The advantage of ActivityPub is the same as MB, you can reply to me. I then have a mastodon account with cross posting that I directly use more often when I feel like it.

I think a lot of folks (not a blame or problem!) can over think the Micro.blog compatibility. It's just providing another option for following your blog!

Dr. Adam Procter

@jsonbecker thanks, I hear you, I just got totally confused by having both on so I think I’ll stick to cross posting and replying to mastodon app when I need to and checking mentions in both MB app and mastodon app

Craig McClellan

Even though I’m not using Mastodon, I still appreciate the thought and care you put into this feature. Finding the right compromise between the open web and keeping mb unique is hard, and you walked the line really well here.

Jatan

Nice! Happy that my Mastodon & Fediverse presence via Micro.blog is now essentially feature complete.

John Chandler

I chose to plant myself in micro.blog because I appreciate how the simplicity you are cultivating, and the features you are limiting, encourages posting over 'platforming'. I'd be okay with never getting a DM, I suppose, but I appreciate the way you are handling this feature.

Manton Reece

@johnchandler Thanks! Glad you’re here.

rom

thanks for this! :)

Manton Reece @manton
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