How To Send Quoted Replies In Facebook Messenger

Its about to get a lot easier to manage conversations on Facebook. The social giant—when it’s not busy ruining your account security—is adding a new sort-of threaded reply feature for all users’ Messenger conversations. When you use one of these replies, you’ll be able to respond to a comment with text, GIFs, images, and video. Your entry will appear beneath a quoted version of whatever you were replying to, making it easier for you and the original comment-maker to have a bit of a sidebar.

The reply feature comes just a few weeks after Facebook began rolling out an early version of a dark theme for the mobile app, as well as the release of an unsend option that lets users remove a message from chat up to ten minutes after its sent.

Heres how to use the new reply feature on your specific chat client:

How to reply to messages in Facebook Messenger

On the mobile app

• Open a conversation in the Facebook Messenger app
• Long-press on any message (including your own)
• Press the Reply arrow icon
• Type your response (or add GIFs/images) and press send

On desktop

• Open the web version of Messenger
• Hover your mouse over a message
• Click on the Reply icon (or the “...” icon, if theres no Reply icon)
• Type and send your message

Unlike the conversation threading you find in apps like Slack or Twitter, wherein replies are consolidated in a thread beneath the original message, replies in Messenger will appear chronologically in the normal conversation flow. The original message will also remain in its original spot in the conversation as well.

Replies might not be quite as good as true conversation threading, but it’s better than nothing. At the very least, you no longer have to worry about a direct response getting lost in the din of a highly active group chat.