I think Twitter might have been the first time I saw DM used but it stands for direct message.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
21 points (92.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43340 readers
2067 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Twitter is where it started.
And every 'hip' person started talking about sliding into someone's DM and it became the default application.
PM is still used in professional settings sometimes.
DM is direct message and seems to have started around the same time things culturally shifted away from forums and boards more toward social media.
And now people don't even understand me, like I wrote "I'll PM you" and they said "What π€¨" π€¦.
Guess I'll have to shift from using PM to DM... though it seems completely illogical to me, but hey, that's life I guess.
I somehow never realized it was a shift from forums. I've used both terms interchangeably with a bias towards DM. TIL
"I'll Prime Minister you"
"I'll prime meridian you"
"I'll post mortem you"
"I'll prima dona you"
"I'll Pringle Mingle you"
Gonna steal "pringle mingle", sounds like a great insult lol
"I'll dungeon master you"
"I'll deathmatch you"
That last one was probably used at some point in time though..
βDirect Messageβ , from Twitter.
I assume it's direct message. I also come from the forum scene and grew up with PMs. The cynic in me says maybe the big social media companies are shy of using the "private" word when their business model revolves around exploiting user data. Alternatively it's just language evolving over time.
Because of the phrase 'slide into the DMs'. I tried to 'slide into the PM' but the Prime Minister wasn't having any of that
Now itβs just the Dungeon Master of your local D&D group and apparently they were okay with it.
Direct message, I think it mainly comes from twitter where you could add a "d" before someoneβs @ to message them, maybe the use of "direct" instead of "private" was to avoir the confusion with private accounts?
DM means Dungeon Master to me, so I go with PM, if I don't just say message.
Twitter used Direct Message instead of Private Message because they needed to establish that there is legally no understanding of privacy for DMs, because Twitter will surrender the contents of DMs to law enforcement / government / data collection. Fediverse should also use DM because there is again no guarantee of privacy (and you do not expect there to be).
As if admins of the older forum softwares couldn't just query the database for anyone's private messages.
Still, the conversation is private, as in not public. Even if it is surrendered to the authorities, the'll probably never be released publicly (unless leaked).
I suppose it's a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not "private" even if it is not publicly available.
Honestly, it doesn't really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.
PM means private message. Nothing on Facebook or Twitter ever suggested that personal messages were private, so they used direct message instead to make sure there was no legal confusion.
DM stands for Dungeon Master, the person who makes up the story in the game Dungeons and Dragons
when did things change from people calling them PMs to DMs.
I don't think I've ever heard it called a "Pungeon Master"
Just think of the P in PM as a D, but with a tiiiiiiny vertical line going down from the bottom left so itβs a P.
It's what some people call a /whisper
Yeah of pst
DM/PM/IM all mean the same thing
view more: next βΊ