How To Send a Message to Someone Who’s Not Your Friend in Discord

Evan Gower December 4, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvxFAWVo5AI

Discord is one of the most popular chat applications on the internet, providing a platform for gamers, online communities, and more to communicate and gather. Discord can be used in many different ways, whether it’s finding people with the same interests, meeting people who play the same game, reconnecting with old friends from the past, or even working together on a cool app or game. Since there are uses for Discord other than just gaming, Discord also provides a fully functional voice and video call system which its users can take advantage of.

However, there is one question many people have: can you message people on Discord who aren’t on your Friends list? And if so, how?

This article will show you everything you need to know about Discord’s privacy settings and how to find any user on Discord.

Can You Message Someone Who Isn’t on Your Friends List?

Let’s say that you just met someone while playing games on Discord. You really enjoyed playing the game with them, and you’d like to keep on playing with them in the future. Does Discord allow you to direct message them to invite them to future games?

The answer depends on what privacy settings your new friend has in place. As one of the most popular chat platforms out there, Discord has implemented a comprehensive and modular set of privacy features meant to allow any user to fully control who and when people can send them direct messages; it helps people avoid unsolicited DMs from people who they may not want to talk to. By customizing these Privacy & Safety options, you can make your Discord experience as private or public as you’d like it to be.

How to Message Someone On Discord Who Isn’t Your Friend

One of the great features that Discord has to offer is the ability to chat without trolls, spam, and just plain excessively annoying discourse. With that said, one of the drawbacks is the ability to message anyone you’d like whenever you’d like.

Officially, Discord doesn’t give us the option to chat with another user unless we’re friends.

So, if you wanted to chat with someone (and you had their user ID), sending them a message isn’t as simple as tapping the chatbox, looking them up, and sending a message. If you tried that, you’d see this screen:

But don’t worry just yet, because there are some ways that you can chat with another user despite your friendship status on the platform.

Use Mutual Channels

The easiest way to private message another Discord user is from within a channel. Assuming you, and the other user are in the same server, this should be relatively simple.

Open the Discord Channel and tap on their profile icon. A small box will appear letting you type a private message. Simple.

Now, this only works if you both are in the same groups. So, let’s keep going just in case this method doesn’t work for you.

Create a Shareable Link – Group Chats

Another option goes back to needing that person’s username (with the digits included). Once you have that ready, open Discord and click on the chat icon in the upper right-hand corner. Type in the username with the ‘#’ and the four-digit number that accompanies it, then click ‘Create Group.’

A shareable link will appear that you can copy, paste, and send (via text or email) to the other user. Worst case scenario, this will let the other user know that you’re trying to chat. Best case scenario, it’s a friend who actually wants to chat.

While admittedly, this isn’t the best workaround to our predicament it is one way you can message another person on Discord even if they haven’t added you.

Create a Server Invite

Keeping up with the shareable links theme here, another option you have is lengthy, but you can chat with non-friends if you do it right. One issue with Discord is getting the service to recognize usernames so this might be a great workaround if you aren’t able to friend another person because of username issues.

Go to your server (or create one) and tap on the Settings cog next to one of your channels. Click ‘Invites’ on the left-hand side, and click ‘Create a New One.’ That last bit is going to be small blue print at the top in case you have trouble finding it.

A page will appear with a shareable link. Copy and paste it in a text or message (on another platform) send it to the person you’d like to chat with. If they click the link and accept you can private message them as we explained above, or chat with them in your Discord channel.

Note: The last two options depend heavily on your ability to contact the other user on a platform outside of Discord so they may not be the best solution. But, they do work if you’re having trouble messaging someone who isn’t a friend.

Safe Direct Messaging

Navigate to your User Settings and find the Privacy & Safety tab. There, you’ll find Discord’s comprehensive list of privacy features, meant to allow you to customize your privacy and security settings to keep yourself safe on Discord.

The first section in this tab is Safe Direct Messaging. This section allows you to adjust how safe you’d like your DMs to be, allowing you to have Discord’s automated systems scan your messages for explicit and inappropriate content and delete them if they contain bad content.

You have three options:

Keep Me Safe – This option will scan your direct messages from everyone, even your closest friends. This is the option we recommend that you enable if you won’t be sending or receiving any potentially explicit content.
My Friends Are Nice – This option will scan your direct messages from everyone unless they are on your friends’ list. This is useful if you want your friends to send you content that might be considered explicit or inappropriate in normal conversations.
I Live On The Edge – Enabling this option will completely turn off Discord’s scanning feature. This means that messages you receive won’t be scanned at all, putting you at risk of receiving potentially inappropriate or explicit messages.

Take Note of the ‘Allow direct messages from server members‘ option. If the recipient has that toggled off, our first option to message from within a server will not be successful.

Other Privacy And Safety Settings

Apart from Safe Direct Messaging, there are a number of other options in the Privacy & Safety panel that will allow you to fully customize your privacy and security settings. The most important one is probably Server Privacy Defaults, which is a simple but powerful privacy option.

Turning this option on (the default setting) will allow anyone from any of your servers to send you Direct Messages without being on your friends’ list. It will open up your DMs to anyone and everyone who shares a mutual server, which may be ok if you are only in small servers, but can get very dangerous very quickly if you’re in one or more public servers, exposing you to potential DM advertisements and spammers.

If you choose to toggle this option off, thus blocking people not on your Friends list from DMing you, you will be given the option to apply this setting to all servers you’re in. We recommend doing this, as you can right-click on each server you’d like to allow DMs from and manually override the setting for each of them, while still keeping you safe on the majority of your servers. This server by server customization makes this simple option an extremely powerful privacy tool.

The third and final Privacy feature is “Who Can Add You As A Friend.” As the name of the section suggests, these options allow you to customize who exactly is allowed to send you a Friend Request on Discord, whether it’s everyone, Friends of Friends, or people who you share a server with. These three options are all able to be toggled on or off:

Everyone – Turning this on allows anyone on Discord to send you a friend request.
Friends of Friends – Turning this on allows anyone who share mutual friends to send you a friend request.
Server Members – Turning this on allows anyone who shares a server with you to send you a friend request.

We generally recommend that you leave these settings at their defaults, because even if someone sends you a friend request, you have the option to decline it after screening it. However, if you’re the admin or moderator of a large server, or a famous figure on the internet, you may want to customize these settings to avoid receiving a deluge of random friend requests from server members or well-wishers.

Below are several miscellaneous options which deal with how Discord uses your data. Discord collects a large amount of data on how and where you use Discord, including your usage habits, your servers, what platforms you use Discord on, and more in order to improve and customize your Discord experience; if you don’t want Discord to collect and store your data, you can toggle options that allow you to prevent Discord from using your data for improvements or customization, or even request a copy of all the data they collect on you.

We generally recommend you keep these options on to keep your Discord experience the best it can be; however, if you’re someone who’s concerned about the collection of personal data, you have the option to disable these at the cost of less customization. Additionally, we recommend that you regularly request copies of your data and look through it to ensure that Discord’s not collecting any overly intrusive data on you.

How Do I Block Someone On Discord?

If someone has been sending you unsolicited messages on Discord, you can make use of the block feature to keep them from continuing to do so. After you block them, they won’t be able to send you messages or friend requests until you unblock them.

Here’s how you can block people:

In your DM list, right-click on the user you’d like to block and click the “Block” button.
Click the red “Block” button again to confirm that you’d like to block them.

After you block the user, you’ll no longer be able to see the messages they’re sending unless you choose to do so, nor will they be able to send you DMs or friend requests.

Find Your Voice with Discord

Discord is a fantastic chat platform to use if you are someone who plays games or just wants to find people to talk to online. It’s quickly becoming extremely popular as well, even in the non gaming community, for uses such as online communities, clubs, and more. But for all the good people and new friends you meet, there’ll always be a bad person or two, so it’s important to learn how to navigate Discord’s privacy settings to keep them from invading your privacy.