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How do i send DM/PM from Friendica to Mastodon pls?


@Friendica Support @Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ Hello, i'm still new to Friendica, & trying to learn fast how to use it efficiently, given it's quite different to my usual Mastodon & Firefish UI UX. Most things seem to make sense now, except for the following.

Several hours ago i made several attempts to send some test DMs from my libranet.de account, to two of my Mastodon accounts [ie, separate Instances]. I also tried sending it to a friend on a third Masto Instance. I've had a 100% failure rate [none of the DMs arrived at Masto]. Sending ordinary, non-DM, posts to Masto works just fine. I inserted my intended recipients into the field as indicated in the attached picture. Is that the correct way to do it? Should i do something different?



Thanks.
is /message (the letter icon in the top navigation) maybe what you search?
@haheute @Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ Hi, thanks for replying. I have tried your good alternative suggestion several times, in different browsers, & for some reason every time i click the Submit button after drafting my DM, nothing happens, ie, it never actually sends, the page just sits there unchanged, still displaying my draft message. Now i am even more confused :exploding head:
@MsDropbear42 ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บโ€‹ ๐Ÿฆ˜โ™€๐ŸŒˆ๐Ÿงโ€‹ Unfortunately the Private Message feature in /message is sometimes unreliable. Fortunately, you found the correct workaround, no one else but your target recipients can see messages you send using the Access Control List selector in the screenshot you took.
@Hypolite Petovan Hello, thanks for your reply & interesting info.
Unfortunately the Private Message feature in /message is sometimes unreliable

Oh, well that's most disappointing, but certainly fits with my frustrating experience that nothing at all happened after i clicked Submit.
Fortunately, you found the correct workaround, no one else but your target recipients can see messages you send using the Access Control List selector in the screenshot you took

No but you see, this was the reason i made my OP... this method looks like it works from the Friendica perspective, in that the DM "sends" ... but that's no good because the essential second part of the process NEVER occurs, as i said in my OP -- the DM never arrives in Masto, thus defeating the entire purpose.

Tbh i'm feeling a bit distraught about this now, because in other respects, having spent last night & all today inside my new Friendica account & learning how to drive it, i have really come to like it & could definitely imagine switching from my Masto Instance to this one as my new daily default Fedi account. However, it's pretty important that i can still send DMs from here to contacts in Masto, so if i can't [& as of now, i still cannot], then it jeopardises the possibility of using this account fulltime. It's a bit sad. ๐Ÿ˜ข
@MsDropbear42 ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บโ€‹ ๐Ÿฆ˜โ™€๐ŸŒˆ๐Ÿงโ€‹ I hear your frustration, but now I'm a bit confused. Out of the two methods you tried to send DMs to Mastodon accounts, which one worked if any? The Private Message page or the regular Compose page with the Access Control List tailored to send only to a specific account?

Also which Submit button you clicked where nothing happened at all? This could be a local interface/script bug rather than a larger federation issue.
@MsDropbear42 ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บโ€‹ ๐Ÿฆ˜โ™€๐ŸŒˆ๐Ÿงโ€‹ Also a word of warning about Libranet.de, his admin bravely runs the develop branch where we merge all the new features/fix meant for the next release. This allows us to test our changes in a large user base context, and this means things can break occasionally before we get to fix them.

If you already trust @Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ and would prefer a more stable experience, I'd recommend you to try your luck over at https://venera.social which is also run by Steffen but on the stable branch that only gets updated during official releases.

Otherwise, the official Friendica public server directory can help you find a new home: https://dir.friendica.social/servers
@Hypolite Petovan @Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh! I see! Aaaaarrrgggghh, so maybe i chose the wrong Instance! Oh now i do feel silly! Looks like tomorrow my task will be to find an alternative Friendica Instance, then start all over again setting it up. Deary me, what a waste of time i have done to myself, sigh. I shall try the Export function & hope that it might do most of the work for me, to avoid needing to tediously manually finesse all the settings again. :crossed fingers:

I'm very grateful for your feedback, thank you!
@MsDropbear42 ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บโ€‹ ๐Ÿฆ˜โ™€๐ŸŒˆ๐Ÿงโ€‹ @Steffen K9 ๐Ÿฐ @Hypolite Petovan one of the great things about Mastodon is his you can take your followers with you when you migrate. Friendica is nicer software in many ways, but we are a much more โ€œcottage industryโ€ community and donโ€™t necessarily get feature parity on such things.

But we can post rich text and they canโ€™t see it ๐Ÿ˜‰
@Hypolite Petovan To try to clarify...
which one worked if any?

= neither! Currently NO DM i have attempted to send from my libranet.de account, to 3 separate Masto accounts, has worked.

Pls see the pic i included with my OP. That method "seemed" to work, in that clicking Submit did cause the message UI to disappear from the screen, implying it was sent. But, over at the other end of the "pipeline", ie, the actual target Masto accounts, they never received any of those DMs.

Then, more recently, as per @haheute suggestion, i tried the other method. That's the one that never responds at all, after i write my DM, when i click the Submit button. After i send this reply to you, i shall take a screenshot of what i mean & post it here, so there's no ambiguity.
I have just tried to send a direct message to my mastodon account with the /message method. that arrived. I can read it there.
from my libranet.de account the same test worked, too. I just find it a bit irritating to see the direct/private messages between regular posts on mastodon. *shrug
xy has an account on my node. ๐Ÿ™‚ I'll try it too and see if I can find some issue.
Tried it with a Mastodon account I follow and I'm followed. Created a private message via .../message. It worked.
Test via composer and permission only for that Masto account.
@MsDropbear42
Do you follow the account you want to write to and does the account follow you back?

From my observation, it is not possible to send a private message to an account that does not follow you.
@Matthias โœ” Hello, thanks. I had also wondered that, but i double-checked it yesterday, & now this morning i have triple-checked. All three of those Masto accounts [two of which are mine] are definitely Mutual Follows with this my libranet.de account.

Thanks also to all the others, above, who have kindly weighed in whilst i slept, trying to help. Given that afaict at least two of you do seem to be able to successfully send DMs from here that do get received at Masto accounts, that logically implies that there is now in fact no reason for me to change my Friendica Instance coz the Devel status of the software cannot after all be to blame. That returns the blame to me, yet i still so far cannot discover why they don't work for me.

Now i wonder if some specific Setting i chose, can be responsible? I'll post a screenshot of my Settings in just a tick, given you peeps are far wiser than me with Friendica. Maybe i ticked or unticked a box that is causing this? ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™€๏ธ
@Hypolite Petovan Hello. After lots more testing today, i now have 50% happy news!

  • I've still never succeeded in receiving a DM in Masto that was sent from Friendica [both libranet.de AND a new venera.social account i made today], if i use the 4-tab popup post-composer windowlet, with my Masto handle listed in the Permissions tab as a Private Message. Every single time, the DM appears to Send ok from Friendica, but it simply never arrives in Masto. Otoh...
  • Finally i have succeeded in sending DMs that DO arrive in Masto, using the Friendica "Envelope Icon" toolbar shortcut to https://libranet.de/message. The solution was exasperatingly simple, yet completely obscure to me for 36 hours coz i was relentlessly just blindly following posting "the Masto way", unaware that this is wrong in Friendica. Specifically in https://libranet.de/message, each previous time that i had tried unsuccessfully to send a DM, i had prefaced my Masto handle with "@", because in Masto that IS part of the handle. It was only today that finally i decided to see what would happen if i omitted that leading "@", at which point i was delighted but astonished to see that finally the autodetect kicked in, it successfully matched my correct handle, & consequently all my DMs now DO properly Send from both my Friendica accounts, AND get received in my Masto account. Phew & thank bloody goodness, coz this was driving me batty!


I'm still disappointed that #1 does not work for me, but very happy that at least #2 does.

As such, this certainly eliminates any possibility that my problem [#1 OR #2] might have been caused by a bug in the Dev version [libranet.de], given that i proved today that the problem equally occurred in the Stable version [venera.social] ... and now i know how to avoid/solve #2.

Thank you all for helping, & sorry that i was such a slow learner.
#1 #2
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