they are actually toots. it's an feature that other people can read what you say in private to someone and ban you if it's creepy (the conversation) besaid feature is active on all instances it's not opt out. no instance has an inhouse fix (think they would post about it, since people like to talk in private. I mean almost every human on earth does use e2ee but mastodon is such an (honestly? the devs are drunk or something really fishy going on there. they got funding and build an client (that is exactly what was NOT need or useable or their thing)) clusterfuck. it's to complecated they say. I know, ping me if you have same thought, it's easy to fix!

These are two words for the same concept.

Not at all. One is private, one is direct and not private.

Twitter has DMs. Are they not private?

to most people YES, it pretty hard to grap DMs from twitters server. Especially compared to reading them in plaintext like on mastodon. you thing meta is not good but it's still e2ee so your better of writing there.