PairLume Community DM Guide: Privacy, Requests, and Etiquette

DMs are for the parts you do not want on the public thread. Here is what you can control and how to stay safe.

Most conversations here happen in the open, on posts and in the comments. Direct messages are for the follow up. Someone says something in a thread that lands, and you want to ask them one more thing without the whole room watching.

You control who can start a DM with you. In your privacy settings you can accept messages from everyone, from people who send a request first, from friends only, or from nobody at all. The safest default for most people is requests.


A request means the message sits in a separate inbox until you accept it. You can read the first line without the sender knowing whether you opened it, and you can block them from that same screen if the tone is off.

Keep DMs to the same subject the post was about. If someone opens with something that has nothing to do with your thread, that is usually a sign to close it. Report and block are one tap each.