Hide Slack DMs and channels when you share your screen

Slack has no built-in way to hide DMs while presenting

Slack offers no setting that hides or masks your DM list, channel names or unread badges while you present: nothing in the product amounts to a presenter mode. Its sidebar preferences filter which conversations are listed, and that is as close as it gets. To be precise about what those preferences can do:

• Show fewer conversations. The default filter lists active conversations and hides ones with no new activity in the past 30 days, and you can hide muted conversations entirely.
• Reorganize. Default sections can be reordered, and paid plans add custom sections.
• Resize and restyle. Sidebar width, icons with or without text.

Useful housekeeping, but notice what is missing: every conversation that survives the filter is listed under its real name, with its real unread badge and, for DMs, a presence dot that updates live. One glimpse of a sidebar reading a candidate's name, your manager, and a channel called #layoffs-planning tells the room a story, and filtering to active conversations makes that list shorter, not safer. And a sidebar that looks clean when you start sharing stops being clean the moment a new message lands and its badge lights up.

So the fixes that work all control what reaches the screen, not what Slack shows. Here they are, ranked from strongest to most situational.

Option 1: present from a tab, so Slack never reaches the feed

The cleanest fix is to present from a browser tab and share only that tab, which keeps Slack, and everything else on your machine, out of the feed entirely. A tab share captures the inside of one page: no other windows, no desktop, no toasts, no Slack.

Google Meet has the mode built in (Present now, then A tab). Zoom and Microsoft Teams offer it when you join from the browser, where the share picker lists your open tabs. The walkthrough for all three, plus what each mode exposes, is in Share a tab, not a window.

The part that surprises people: with a tab share running, Slack can sit right next to your presentation on the same monitor, fully visible to you, and viewers never see it. The capture follows the page, not your screen. If a colleague pings you mid-demo, you see the toast and your audience does not, which is the correct arrangement: you can read it, decide, and answer after, without a word of it leaking.

The obvious limit: this only works when the demo is not Slack itself. When it is, keep reading.

Option 2: if Slack must be visible, blur it in the browser

When Slack has to be on screen, run it in the browser and blur the sidebar before you share: Slack works fully in a web browser (sign in at slack.com/signin), and the browser version is the one an extension can actually reach.

1. Open your workspace in Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc.
2. Open the Blurr.ing toolbar and pick click-to-blur. Click the DM list, then hold Alt and scroll to grow the selection from one conversation to the whole Direct messages section, or keep going and take the entire sidebar.
3. Prefer a freeform patch? Draw a box over the sidebar instead. Both gestures are free, unlimited, and need no account.
4. To hide specific people wherever they appear (sidebar, message headers, search results), add their names as a Blur Text rule. Rules combine with AND/OR/NOT and come with 34 presets for emails, phone numbers, card numbers and keys. The free plan runs one saved rule at a time; Premium runs any number at once.
5. Need to read something under a blur yourself? Hovering shows a Reveal pill, and Premium adds click to peek, where the blur lifts for a look and snaps back.

Two refinements worth knowing. The blur rides the element it covers, so scrolling the sidebar keeps the frost exactly where it belongs instead of leaving a smear at a fixed spot on the screen. And if profile photos worry you more than names, an Auto Blur rule for images frosts every avatar on the page with one switch, which reads a lot calmer on a call than a patchwork of hand-drawn boxes over faces.

Said plainly, because this is where most guides get vague: a browser extension cannot blur the Slack desktop app. The desktop app is not a page in your browser, so no extension runs inside it, Blurr.ing included. If you present from the desktop app, blurring is off the table; switch to browser Slack, or lean on options 1, 3 and 4.

One behavior to know before a live call: free blurs clear when the page reloads, so a mid-call refresh of Slack means redrawing, which costs a couple of gestures. Premium saves blurs per page and restores them before Slack first paints, so the sidebar comes back already frosted, with no flash of real names, and the same blurs are waiting for next week's demo.

Option 3: pause notifications so no toast lands mid-demo

Type /dnd in any Slack message field to pause notifications, and pair it with your operating system's Do Not Disturb. Slack's command takes plain phrases:

• /dnd for 30 minutes pauses for a set stretch.
• /dnd until 5pm pauses until a time.
• /dnd off resumes.

The same control lives under your profile picture, then Pause notifications, with preset timeframes. If you present on a rhythm, Slack's notification schedule can silence the same hours every week without you remembering to.

Two caveats keep this honest. First, pausing stops new toasts; it does not clean the screen. The DM list stays listed, the open thread stays open, and colleagues see a snooze icon on your profile, while a sender who insists can still push one urgent notification through. It is a reduction, not a guarantee. Second, Slack's pause silences Slack alone: calendar reminders, mail previews and texts keep popping, which is what macOS Focus and Windows Do not disturb are for. And quiet the sound too if you share audio: Microsoft's own docs warn that Teams' Include sound sends all computer audio, notifications included.

Option 4: keep a demo workspace and a clean browser profile

For demos you give repeatedly, the durable fix is a separate Slack workspace holding demo content, opened in a browser profile that is signed into nothing personal. There is simply nothing sensitive on screen to leak.

The workspace side: a workspace created just for demos, populated with example channels and placeholder conversations, so the sidebar can be shared at full size with zero real names on it. The browser side: a dedicated profile brings its own history, autofill and extensions, which also cures the address-bar autocomplete leaks that haunt window and screen shares.

The cost is an hour of setup and a little upkeep, which is why this is option 4 and not option 1. For a weekly sales demo it pays for itself the first time a real customer's name does not appear next to your prospect's.

Put it together: the 60-second pre-share routine

Sixty seconds before you share: pause notifications, pick the narrowest sharing mode, and blur whatever stays visible.

1. /dnd until 5pm in Slack, plus OS Do Not Disturb.
2. Present from a browser tab if the demo allows it, and Slack never appears.
3. If Slack must be visible: browser Slack, sidebar blurred, repeat offenders handled by a Blur Text rule with their names.
4. If you must share a window or the whole screen: Tab Privacy masks every tab title and favicon (17 styles; the free plan covers three activations), and spare windows get closed, not minimized.
5. Afterwards, clear the blurs in one click, or let Premium keep them saved for the next call.

The generalized version of this routine, covering every app and not just Slack, lives in the screen-share privacy checklist.