is this the only way to "DM" on HF?

Yes this is the best way :)

Picture this: I upload a model to an organization, someone who follows me now has no idea that I've uploaded a model or to where, unless they also watch those repos (which also floods them with other notifications)

People who follow you will see that you uploaded a model to an organization in their following feed. (also maybe there should be a new feature to be explicitly notified about new repositories).

What if our main Huggingface page was a collection of both models that we've uploaded specifically to our profile, as well as models we've uploaded to organizations? That way it would all be contained in one central followable location, and I wouldn't have concerns about losing followership if I wanted to upload to an organization all of a sudden.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea - it just makes sense 👀. We will have to see if something like that is possible without cluttering up the profile pages too much. But we'll try.

I think we'll be doing a social features sprint soon and this is exactly the kind of feedback we need! Thank you so much!