Sending a direct message
For fans and creators — how to start a chat, what you can put in a message, how fast you can send, and what Sent, Delivered and Seen mean.
To start a chat with a creator, open their profile and press Message. If you are not signed in you are sent to log in first and returned to the profile afterwards. Your chats live under Chats.
Opening a chat twice does not create two chats — you get the same one back, with the creator’s pinned message if they have one.
Some creators restrict who may write to them, in which case pressing Message can be refused. See Choosing who can message you.
What a message can contain
- Text: up to 2,000 characters. Leading and trailing spaces are trimmed.
- Files: up to 10 per message, taken from files you already hold. Each file can carry its own caption of up to 200 characters.
- A message needs text or at least one file. An empty one is refused with “Please enter a valid message.”
You can reply to a specific message, and react to one with one of six reactions — like, love, laugh, wow, sad and dislike. One reaction per person per message; tap the same one again to remove it.
Voice notes
The microphone appears in the send position when the composer is empty. Press and hold it to record; you get a blinking dot, a timer and a level meter while you speak.
A single take stops on its own at 10 minutes or 128 MB. Reaching either ceiling stops the recording and keeps what you said — it does not throw the take away.
The recording uploads like any other file, and cannot be sent until it has finished processing. Then it goes as an ordinary message with one audio file, with or without a caption.
If a recording fails, nothing is sent and you are told which of these happened:
- “This browser cannot record audio.”
- “Microphone permission was refused.”
- “No microphone is available on this device.”
- “That take had no audio in it, so nothing was sent.”
- “No sound reached the microphone. Check that this browser is allowed to use it in your system settings.”
- “The recording could not be uploaded. Nothing was sent.”
How many messages you can send at once
EVVA slows down bursts, per person:
- 20 messages per minute in any one chat.
- 60 messages per minute across all your chats together.
Go past either and you see “You’re sending messages too quickly. Please wait about N seconds and try again.” with the actual number of seconds. Waiting and sending again works.
Sent, Delivered and Seen
A message you send shows Sent, then Delivered. Seen appears only if the other person shows their read receipts.
Read receipts are symmetric. If you hide yours, you stop being shown anybody else’s — so you never see Seen on your own messages either. You cannot watch while staying unwatchable.
Typing indicators
You see when the other person is typing. The indicator is throttled quietly in the background, so on a very fast keyboard some of the updates are dropped without telling you.
When a message will not send
- “Recipient is not accepting messages” — a mute or a block. The same sentence covers both, deliberately. See Muting, blocking and reporting.
- “Your attachments could not be sent.” — one of the files is not yours, not known, or not finished processing. Retrying the same message fails the same way; change the files. Your draft and the file tray are kept so you can fix it.
- “That message could not be retried safely. Please send it again as a new message.” — a retry collided with a different message already recorded under the same retry key. Send it as a new message.