Can you send a DM in Mastodon?

Is the DM button called "Privately mention"? Or is that something else?

5 comments

correct.

when composing a message you can also set the visibility to whoever is mentioned in your message exclusively:

those messages aren't encrypted, as stated on the banner above
- To elaborate on the lack of E2EE, this doesn't mean your ISP or so can see the content (the traffic between you and the server is encrypted as part of HTTPS), but your instance admin or anybody else with access to the server could.
Yep. A "private" message where the recipient is listed in the message is a DM in Mastodon. It will only be delivered to the mentioned person.
In addition to what others have already pointed out, please also note that mentioning any other account in a "private" message chain will allow that account to retroactively see all the messages in the chain.

Basically DMs in Mastodon are pretty useless.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24837

I think so, and I agree that it's confusing. There's some discussion about it here