Ideas to avoid sending messages to the wrong people

I came across this toot today Kate Morley: "The only AI feature I’d want in a messaging app i…" - Hachyderm.io. I fired off a few ideas there, but this is probably a better place to discuss this. Gary "grim" Kramlich: "@katemorley@hachyderm.io Hmm this is an interesti…" - Mastodon

We’ve all done it before, sent a message to the wrong recipient. It’s a difficult problem to avoid, but as I mentioned in my reply there’s a number of things that might work but I wanted to move this to a place where we’re less likely to lose it.

  • Custom avatars can catch your eye but are still pretty error prone.
  • Some sort of color coding could work but are only marginally better than custom avatars.
  • Custom background or theme could be interesting, but would require a lot of work to do decently.
  • Spaces (grouping of conversations) are helpful, but only limit the problem.
  • We could disable the send button if a word in a word list is in the message.
  • A plugin could be used to control whether or not the send button was enabled on a schedule.
  • In general, maybe some sort of a molly-guard could be interesting. Like a slider to to enable the button or allow “send on return” or something.

Anyone got any other ideas?

I actually like this idea.

Good idea to help avoid sending messages to the wrong person, etc.

Many times I wish I had that.

Just my +1 here for this feature

1 Like