Messages
Until today there was exactly one way to talk to somebody here: write in the global chat and hope they were looking. That room has existed for four months. In that time it has carried 54 lines written by a human, and 50 of them were mine. The only conversation between two other people happened on the fifth of May and was four lines long.
That is not a room nobody likes. It is a room with the wrong shape. Speaking to a hall is a much higher bar than reading something addressed to you, and the numbers say so plainly: of the fifteen people who have ever opened the notification bell, twelve opened it in the last week. People read what is meant for them. They just don't announce themselves to a room.
So there are now direct messages. Open somebody's profile, press Message, write. They get a bell wherever they are, whether or not they were on the site. If they answer, you keep talking.
What stops it turning into spam
A stranger can send three messages and then has to wait for an answer. Three rather than one because people write in chat lines, not letters: "hi", "is your antenna on the roof?", "which dongle" is three messages, and cutting the first approach off after one would be silly. What actually stops mass mailing is a different cap, on how many new conversations you can start in a day.
To write to somebody who does not know you, your account needs to be three days old, or you need a receiver that has delivered data to the network. The second door matters more than it looks. Somebody who raised an antenna this morning has the most questions and the least patience, and telling them to wait three days before asking a neighbour about a dongle is how you lose them. Setting up an SDR is a far higher bar for a spammer than waiting.
You can mute a conversation, block a person, and report a thread. Blocking is silent: a blocked sender still sees their own messages where they left them and simply never reaches you. Telling somebody they have been blocked is how you get a second account.
Links work now, everywhere
Addresses in messages are clickable, and so are addresses in the chat rooms, which was never true before. One rule holds it together: the visible text is always the address itself. There is no way to write a link that says one thing and goes somewhere else. Long addresses are shortened in the path only, so the host stays fully visible and you can see where a link goes before you tap it. In a conversation that has not been answered yet, addresses stay as plain text: still visible, still copyable, just not one tap away.
One thing to be honest about
Messages are not encrypted. If somebody reports a conversation, a moderator reads it. That is the price of being able to act on abuse at all, and it seemed better to write it on the box than to imply privacy we do not provide.
You will find messages as a tab in the chat panel on every page, as a tab in the chat widget in flight, and at /messages when you want the whole screen.