This has probably happened to you at one time or another. You see a tweet that you found funny or interesting and you wanted to send it to several friends. However, you accidentally seemed to have created a group chat when you DM-ed it to several people at once and now you’ve put everybody including yourself in a possibly awkward situation. Some new improvements to the Direct Messaging might help you avoid that mistake as well as make your DM experience better on the platform.
Twitter says you will now be able to share the same tweet you want to share in up to 20 different DM conversations and that you can do it separately. This is good news for those who have a lot of one-on-one conversations going on with various people that do not know each other. The downside is that it might bring more spam to your inbox since it will be easier now for people to send the same message to as many as 20 people.
No more (awkward) accidental group chats when you DM a Tweet to multiple people. Now you can share the same Tweet in up to 20 different DM convos, separately.
Rolling out on iOS and web, and soon on Android. (2/5) pic.twitter.com/oHYseF3EJE
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) August 19, 2021
Some of the other new DM-y things that they’re rolling out include a new quick-scroll button that gets you to the latest message if you’re scrolling through a chat, especially a chat with a lot of messages. When reacting to a message, you now have two options: the double-tap and the long press. The latter leads to an “add reaction” button that you can tap and it will pull up the reaction picker. It’s still not as intuitive as Facebook’s but at least you get another option to react.
Lastly, your conversations are now grouped by date so you get less timestamp clutter. The individual messages will still have the timestamp of course but now you’ll see them grouped accordingly by date. This should make it easier to scroll through the past messages if you’re looking for something. There’s still a lot that needs improvement in the search function for DMs so hopefully, this is something that’s in the pipeline soon.
The bad news for Android users is that most of these new features are not yet available for the platform. Only the quick scroll button is now available and the sending the same tweet to 20 individual DMs is still coming soon.
