@andros maybe create a separate, completely distinct feed for DM? That way, clients do not need to do anything, only those wanted to "talk in private" follow themselves, using their very special dm-only.txt feeds. 😂

@andros define "compatible" 😅. On the "not addressed to me", if I follow you, I will see your twtxts, whether they are addressed to me, or not.

@andros I give you not creating another file, but then I'd vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna

It's easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P You can even use a Modified comment, such as #! <DM content> Or something like that

This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.

@andros Some good points here that I share and empathize with 🙌

by commenting out DMs are you giving up on simplicity? See the Metadata extension holding the data inside comments, as the client doesn't need to show it inside the timeline.

I don't think that commenting out DMs as we are doing for metadata is giving up on simplicity (it's a feature already), and it helps to hide unwanted DMs to clients that will take months to add it's support to something named... an extension.

For some other extensions in https://twtxt.dev/extensions.html (for example the reply-to hash <a href="?search=abcdfeg" class="tag">#abcdfeg</a> or the mention @ < example http://example.org/twtxt.txt >) is not a big deal. The twt is still understandable in plain text. For DM, it's only interesting for you if you are the recipient, otherwise you see an scrambled message like 1234567890abcdef=. Even if you see it, you'll need some decryption to read it. I've said before that DMs shouldn't be in the same section that the timeline as it's confusing.

So my point stands, and as I've said before, we are discussing it as a community, so let's see what other maintainers add to the convo.