this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
40 points (93.5% liked)
Casual Conversation
3857 readers
296 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible.
- Avoid controversial topics (e.g. politics or societal debates).
- Stay calm: Don’t post angry or to vent or complain. We are a place where everyone can forget about their everyday or not so everyday worries for a moment. Venting, complaining, or posting from a place of anger or resentment doesn't fit the atmosphere we try to foster at all. Feel free to post those on !goodoffmychest@lemmy.world
- Keep it clean and SFW
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
Casual conversation communities:
- !casualuk@feddit.uk
- !casualeurope@piefed.social
- !forumlibre@jlai.lu
- !batepapo@lemmy.eco.br
- !esp@lemm.ee
Related discussion-focused communities
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- !askmenover30@lemm.ee
- !dads@feddit.uk
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk
- !movies@piefed.social
- !television@piefed.social
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Seems pretty straightforward.
"Hey, what's up? You're not in trouble or anything, but I'd like to ask if it's okay to message you privately. I have a question for you."
I don't see any reason not to indulge this person, it seems like they're curious about something.
They sent a private message to ask if they could privately ask something? That's really really strange to me.
And if they're starting the message implying that I'm not in trouble, then that makes it even more confusing because I have no reason to think I would be in trouble.
But if this is a now common way of communicating with people, then I genuinely want to understand that. I simply never read or heard any examples of it from a stranger out of the blue.
The main reason I'm not indulging it is simply because I get multiple spam messages via SMS each week. They all start with an attempt to phish for somebody's attention. Something as simple as saying "hello" or "are you still going to make it tonight?" Then it's revealed that, whoops wrong number, and they start trying to interact with you (because, why not, it's friendly) and eventually phish for information. It's a pretty common scheme.
At first I used to have fun responding, but after doing more reading on the scheme and the unfortunate people who are being used to send those kinds of messages, I realized makes things worse for the person being forced to do that work.
What threw me off about this one is that I couldn't understand it. And for that reason, it made me wonder if it really was spam in the first place. I mean I've seen grammatically incorrect spam all the time, but this one could be intentional. So I figured I'd see if other people fully understood what it meant.
I see what you're saying here, yeah.
Digital etiquette has evolved a lot. Typically, these days, sending a message in your DMs is less like pulling you aside for a whisper and more like shouting inside your living room. The culture that's grown up around power-tripping mod bans, scams, and other awful shit has made messaging someone privately a delicate matter.
This person is being polite by knocking on your door to announce that they're already in your living room, and asking permission to speak with you. I see this as excellent behavior, filling a glaringly bad gap in user privacy protections on other platforms. They're being decent about an intrusion that's a (tragically common) built-in design flaw of the app.
This is interesting.
My lack of experience on most socials isn't helping. I've never used Snapchat Twitter Instagram tiktock etc. Pixelfed was my first venture into that realm, but i only use it as a person gallery and to check out interesting photography from others. I know it's modeled on Instagram, which has grown beyond that quite a bit, but that's never been for me though.
Anyway, thanks for the insight.
The Internet's grown up a lot. Different websites and apps will develop entire subcultures, with different slang, etiquette, politics, and posting standards. What's acceptable in one neighborhood will get you downvoted into oblivion somewhere else. Like the real world, everybody eventually finds their lunch table.
100% this. There are very specific kinds of communities that I gravitate towards. Forums, link aggregators, and the older social platforms like FB where are you friend actual friends. The lack of high-speed internet and mobile data made a lot of the other platforms less accessible to me as I've lived around the world. When you have a data budget, you don't tend to use media centric services where people scroll through content rapidly. I've also never really been into "following" strangers. I've only recently started doing it on Pixelfed because it helps further define the kind of photography and art I'm interested in looking at.
I pick things up and figure things out over time. Like 4chan green text which I never understood, but would see quoted on Lemmy or Reddit. I'll figure out these abbreviations and manners of speech as well... eventually..haha.