If you send a DM to somebody that has advertised DM relays, it will use NIP-17. Otherwise it will use NIP-04 as a fallback. You can read DMs using both standards.

I'm not going to change this anytime soon. NIP-04 isn't "broken", it is just not as good as NIP-17.

People should understand that nostr and it's various NIP standards are new things that aren't perfect things and if you want state-of-the-art privacy or state-of-the-art security, we simply don't have it here. We only have state-of-the-art decentralization, which yields a less-than-state-of-the-art censorship resistance.

If all the big clients implement NIP-17, then I will remove NIP-04.