Best Hidden Features in Facebook Messenger
If you still have a Facebook account, you will automatically have a Messenger account. Whether you realize it or not, Messenger is one of the most popular apps in the world. (I only use it to sell all my personal items on the Marketplace, but it has other features as well.) Here are the best features you can activate to improve your privacy and usability.
When you click on your profile picture in the upper left corner, the settings menu appears. You can use this to turn on dark mode for those overnight messaging sessions. This menu also contains Active Status, which you can turn off so that other people cannot see if you are online or when you last logged in.
Scroll down to Privacy and select Message Delivery. This allows you to customize who can send you messages in the app – just your Facebook friends, anyone who has your phone number, etc. You can then decide if these messages will go directly to your inbox in in the form of chats or message requests that are easy to ignore. In the “Settings” section, select “Phone Contacts” to manage the data that the application retrieves from the address book.
Once you’re in the chat, click on the other member’s photo and scroll down to “Go to Secret Conversation”. A new chat will appear that offers end-to-end encryption and disappearing messages. If you just swipe your finger over a normal conversation, you can turn on Fade Mode, which will make your messages disappear anyway, albeit without the added encryption. Keep in mind, though – fade mode notifies everyone when someone takes screenshots of the chat.