X Is Working on Decoupling Its DM Functionality

Soon, you’ll be able to use X as your primary DM platform of choice, even if you never post anything else in the app.

Which, I guess, you can already do now, but X is trying to make this a more definitive functional split.

In another step towards Elon Musk’s “everything app” vision, X is currently working on separating out DMs from other in-app experiences.

App researcher Nima Owji has uncovered a new option in the back-end code of the app, which will seemingly enable X users to initiate separate functionality in DMs versus other elements.

So you’d be able to block messages from someone, but still see their posts in-stream.

X owner Elon Musk replied to this, explaining that X is “decoupling” DMs from public posting “so that if all you want to do is use this platform for messaging, but not post publicly, you can do so.”

Which, again, you can practically do now, but the idea is that this will provide another way to use X as a separate tool for your daily interactive process, i.e. you won’t have to log onto X and check the latest posts in order to still use it as your DM platform.

Which is interesting, I guess. Though the main flaw that I see in most of these features and experiments is that there’s not really any reason for people to use them, outside of supporting Elon’s mission to create a “free speech” aligned platform.

Like, sure, you can now watch X’s slate of original video shows on your home TV set, but there’s not really much that has major audience appeal there as yet. And you’ll soon be able to conduct virtual meet-ups on X, instead of using Zoom, but the functionality isn’t at the same level of Zoom or Google Meet. So you’d be changing your established process for a lesser product.

You may even soon be able to make payments on X. But why would you?

I realize that this is all part of the “everything app” vision, and that, eventually, the hope is that X will facilitate so many of your daily functions that you’ll never need to use any other app. But it seems like the calculations for adoption of these features is based on the assumption that people will just use them, as opposed to conducting their daily activities in other apps and tools, as they always have.

Habitual behaviors are hard to shift, and without any real incentive to drive people to X instead, which would ideally be through improved offerings, I don’t see why people will do so.

So right now, X is clearly working on a range of different options, but none of them are better than the various alternatives, which people already use.

So, sure, you may soon be able to message separately on X, so you can use it primarily as a messaging app. But will people care?