@Thib This is partly why I say I think this is a lot like when Mastodon rolled out "private messages" to OStatus that weren't private messages at all, and instead people who shouldn't have seen the messages started seeing them, and it caused a big ruckus. Sounds to me like this is that, volume 2.
It's *worse* to tell users they're having direct messages that don't resemble such at all. Similarly, it's *worse* to tell users that nazis can't see their public posts, when they easily can.