I have a bad habit. Every few months, I look at my Discord sidebar and get completely overwhelmed. It’s a graveyard of dead conversations. There’s the guy I traded Pokemon cards with in 2022. There’s the moderator from a tech support server who helped me fix my microphone once. There are three different crypto bots that I definitely should have blocked but was too lazy to deal with.
So, I go on a cleaning spree. hover, click the X. Hover, click the X. It feels satisfying, like wiping crumbs off a table.
But then, about ten minutes later, the panic sets in. I realize I just closed a DM with someone I actually do need to talk to next week. And suddenly, the questions start racing through my brain. Did I just delete the history? If I message them again, will it look like a brand new chat? Did they get a notification saying “Jony just slammed the door in your face”?
It is a uniquely modern anxiety. We know what happens when we hang up a phone (the connection cuts). We know what happens when we throw a letter in the trash (it’s gone). But app developers have made “Closing” a weird, nebulous concept that sits somewhere between deleting and hiding.
If you are currently staring at a blank sidebar wondering if you just nuked a friendship or lost an important file, take a deep breath. I’ve dug through the documentation and tested this with my spare accounts so you don’t have to. Here is the messy, unpolished truth about the “Close DM” button.
The “Clean Desk” Theory
The most important thing to understand is that Discord treats DMs differently than your phone treats text messages. When you delete a text on your iPhone, it warns you: This will be deleted.
Discord doesn’t warn you when you click the “X.” That should be your first clue that nothing catastrophic is happening.
Think of your Discord account like a physical office desk. Your “Direct Messages” list on the left side is just the papers you currently have spread out on the desk. When you click that X, you aren’t feeding the papers into a shredder. You are simply picking them up and putting them in a filing cabinet.
The conversation is still there. The data is sitting on Discord’s massive servers in Oregon or Virginia or Frankfurt. Every single typo, every embarrassing GIF, and every late-night rant is perfectly preserved. You just told the app, “I don’t want to look at this face right now.”
I tested this specifically to see if anything gets lost. I found a chat from three years ago that I had closed. I reopened it (more on how to do that in a second), and the scroll bar was still there. I could scroll all the way back to 2021. Nothing was missing. So if you closed a chat thinking you were scrubbing evidence, I have bad news: you didn’t scrub anything. You just hid it from yourself.
The Ghost Factor: What Do They See?
This is the part that keeps people up at night. If I close the DM, does the other person know?
I live in Europe right now, but I have friends back in the US and Australia. We are constantly in different time zones. The last thing I want is for my friend in Sydney to wake up, check Discord, and see a notification that I “left” the conversation. It feels aggressive, right?
Here is the good news: They see absolutely nothing.
To the other person, you are still sitting in their sidebar. Even though you nuked them from your view, you are still haunting their view. There is no “User has closed the DM” system message. There is no subtle grey text. The chat window on their screen remains frozen exactly as it was the last time you spoke.
In fact, they can still message you. And this is where it gets funny. If you close a DM to “ignore” someone, it doesn’t actually stop them. The second they send you a “Hello,” the chat forcibly resurrects itself. It pops right back into your sidebar, usually with a red notification badge, as if you never closed it in the first place. You can’t ghost someone just by hitting the X button. You can only delay the inevitable.
How to Dig It Out of the Grave
Okay, so you closed the chat by accident. Or maybe you were trying to be organized, and now you realize you need to find a password you sent them last month. How do you get it back without making it awkward?
You don’t need to wait for them to message you. You have two ways to summon the ghost, and neither of them notifies the other person.
The first way is the Search Bar. At the very top of the Discord app (on Desktop) or the “Find” button (on Mobile), just type their username. When you click their name, it doesn’t start a new chat. It just re-opens the old one. It’s actually seamless. The window slides open, and the history loads instantly.
The second way is through a Mutual Server. If you both hang out in the same gaming server or community, just right-click their profile picture and hit “Message.” It jumps you straight back into the DM.
I use this trick all the time for “bookmarking.” I close DMs constantly to keep my sidebar clean, knowing I can just search their name whenever I need to talk. It’s not “deleting” a contact; it’s just clearing the workspace.
The Dangerous Confusion: Close vs. Block
I need to make a very serious distinction here because I’ve seen people mix this up and cause actual drama.
There is a massive difference between Closing a DM and Blocking a User, but on mobile, the buttons are uncomfortably close to each other.
If you Block someone, you aren’t just putting the papers in the filing cabinet; you are burning the cabinet and changing the locks on the office door.
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Closing: They can still message you.
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Blocking: They cannot message you. If they try, Clyde (the Discord bot) will yell at them.
Also, if you block someone, the chat disappears, but and this is crucial the messages do not disappear for them. They can still see everything you ever sent. They just can’t send anything new. So don’t use “Block” as a way to delete history. It doesn’t work.
A Note on Privacy (The GDPR Reality)
Since we are talking about North America, Europe, and Oceania, we have to talk about the laws. If you are in the UK or the EU, you are used to the “Right to be Forgotten.” You might assume that closing a chat or even deleting your account wipes the slate clean.
Discord is a bit tricky with this. Closing the DM does nothing for privacy. The data is still on their servers. Even if you Unfriend the person, the data is still there. I have DMs from strangers I unfriended five years ago, and I can still read the chats.
If you actually want the messages gone for good like, you sent a credit card number or a personal address and you are panicking you have to manually delete the specific messages. You have to hover over the message, click the three dots, and hit Delete. And you have to do it one by one. (Or use a script, but that’s a great way to get your account banned, so don’t do that).
Look, the sidebar is yours to control. Don’t feel guilty about closing DMs. It’s not a hostile act. It’s digital hygiene.
I treat my Discord sidebar like my browser tabs. If I’m not actively reading it, I close it. It keeps my brain quiet. The people on the other end have no clue, the data is safe, and I can always pull them back up if I get lonely.
So go ahead and click the X. Clear out those bot chats. Hide the conversation with your ex if it helps you move on. The internet is permanent enough as it is; you don’t need to stare at the history every time you log in.