How to appear offline on Facebook everywhere you have an 'active status'

You can set your Facebook Chat and Facebook Messenger statuses separately.
You need to set your status separately for Facebook in a web browser and the Facebook mobile app.
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Facebook may be responsible for putting the word "social" in social media, but there are times when you don't want or don't have time to engage with friends. If you want to log into Facebook and not worry that friends will see you and try to chat, you can easily change your "active status" so you appear offline.

There are no fewer than four places you can control your active status. There's both Messenger and Chat on the Facebook web page if you're browsing, as well as in the Facebook and Facebook Messenger mobile apps.

How to appear offline when using Facebook in a web browser

Unfortunately, Facebook continues to treat Facebook Messenger and Facebook Chat as different things in the web browser, even though all of your conversations end up in the same window. It's possible that you didn't even realize that Facebook has two different instant messaging features on the web.

Here's the difference: When you click the Messenger shortcut on the left side of the Facebook page, you open Facebook Messenger. But if you text someone from the pop-up window that appears over your Facebook news feed, that's Facebook Chat. You'll want to set your active status for both of these.

1. Open Facebook in a browser.

2. In the Chat tab in the lower right corner of your screen, click the Gear icon and then click "Turn Off Active Status."

3. In the Active Status window that appears, click "Turn off active status for all contacts" and then click "Okay."

offline 1 Dave Johnson/Business Insider

It's worth pointing out that you can make it appear that you're offline only for certain users. If there's one or more people whom you would rather not chat with, you can choose to "Turn off active status for only some contacts" and enter those names. You can also do the opposite choose "Turn off active status for all contacts except" This way you can appear offline for almost everyone, but let a select few people be able to see your real active status.