Oh the last thing you want is DMs. On every platform I am on that has DMs whether that is Instagram or Mastodon or whatever, I get approached by people who say something like "Hey!" or "How are you doing today" and if I humor them they want to move the conversation on to Signal where there is less of a paper trail. So far as I could tell it is these people

https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2025-02-08

Right now I am trying to deprogram a rather isolated friend who seems to be sucked into this, it is so frickin' hard to get through to a person who has been seduced, has a crush on somebody, and who has accepted a sob story.

If it is not that, there are all the people who are maybe promoting their onlyfans profile or maybe they're just trying to click on a virus, but either way it is awful. I've been cataloging features that are "expressions of hostility" on BlueSky profiles and one of the most common is "No DM" and it is so common and the people who use it are relatively normal otherwise that we don't treat it as a red flag.

If I was starting out a new platform I'd have a ground rule of never supporting DMs because they are a hotbed of fraud and trouble.

Thats a spam problem and solvable by different means. FWIW I never get such experiences and made internet friends even on reddit via the DM system.

For people to develop friendships with each other, they need to be able to have 1:1 or 1:small time with a ton of back and forth, and public comment sections don't lend themselves to 100 deep message threads. Chat rooms do, chat threads do, and DMs do. In real life it happens naturally as people split off into side conversations.

https://archive.is/yv7k4 Readable article