See Who Read Your Message in a Group Chat

To see who read your message in an Iron Messenger group, tap the message. The menu opens with a "Seen by" row: a double tick, the number of readers and up to three faces. Tap the row and you get the full list, with the time each person read it. It is free, it works in groups of every size, and it now works on your comments under a channel post too, with one list for the group and for the comments.

How do I see who read my message in a group?

Tap your own message in a group chat. The message menu opens, and its first row, above Reply and Copy, is "Seen by". It shows the count ("Seen by 12") and the faces of the last three people who read the message. If nobody has opened the chat since you sent it, the row says "Nobody's peeked yet" and does nothing.

Tap the row and the same card turns into the list. Every reader gets a line with their photo, their name and the moment they read your message: "today at 14:13", "yesterday at 09:02" or "21 Oct at 23:25". The newest reader is on top, and the time is on your own phone's clock. Tap a name to open that person's profile; the back gesture takes you back to the menu, not out of it.

This is free on every tier, in groups of up to 500 members, which is the current limit for any room (see why it was 50 and what changed). Iron Messenger Lite, the app for older phones, has the same row and the same list.

What does the double tick mean in a group?

In a one-on-one chat, the second tick means that the other person read your message. In a group, the second tick means that somebody read it: it turns double when the first other member opens the chat past your message. We tried "double only when everybody read it" first. It did not work, because every public group has a member who joined once and never came back, so every message sat on one tick forever.

So the tick answers "did anybody see it?", and "Seen by" answers "who?". Both come from the same place: how far each member has read. They can never disagree. A message with a double tick always has at least one name in its list.

Writing counts as reading. If somebody answers your message from a notification without scrolling through the chat, they have still seen everything above their own reply, and they appear in your list with the time they wrote.

Can people see when I read their message?

Only if your last seen is open to everybody. A read time says that you had the app open at that minute, which is exactly what "last seen" says. So the read time follows the same setting. If Who can see my last seen is set to contacts or nobody, or Ghost mode is on, the author sees your name in the list with "Read" and no time.

Two details make this stricter than it looks:

• It is decided when you read, not when somebody asks. Turn on Ghost mode, read the chat, turn it off an hour later: those reads stay without a time. Turning your last seen back on never shows the times of reads you made while it was hidden.
• "Contacts" hides the time from contacts too. When you read a message, Iron Messenger does not know yet who will look at the list later, so a reader with a limited last seen has no time for anybody.

Your name still shows: the setting hides when you read, not that you did. Read times are kept for 7 days; after that the reader stays in the list, without a time. More about these settings in how privacy works in Iron Messenger.

Who read my comment under a channel post?

A channel can have comments under every post, and a channel can be linked to a group, where every new post appears as a card and the replies to it are the comments (how to start a channel explains the setup). So a comment is read in two places: in the linked group's chat, and in the comment sheet under the post in the channel.

Until now, "Seen by" was not there for comments at all. A reply to a post card showed a double tick, and the menu would not say who read it. With the update after version 3.9.0, your comment has the "Seen by" row in both places, and both show one list:

• group members who read it in the group chat;
• everybody whose comment sheet showed it, including channel subscribers who never joined the group;
• everybody who wrote a comment below yours, because writing counts as reading.

If somebody read your comment in both places, the list shows the earlier time. A channel with comments and no linked group gets "Seen by" from its comment sheet only.

What if the channel hides its members?

A channel owner can hide the member list, so that subscribers see the hosts and themselves, not each other. "Seen by" keeps that promise. In such a channel, a reader is named in your list only if you could already see them: a member of the linked group, a host of the channel, or somebody who commented in the same thread. Everybody else is counted but not named, and the list ends with a line like "…and 3 more lurking". The channel's owner and moderators see every name, as they do on the member list.

Where will I not see "Seen by"?

• On a post in a channel's own feed. A channel is an audience, not a roster: its posts have no read ticks and no list of readers. The comments under them do.
• In a one-on-one chat. The second tick already says it: there is only one person who could have read it.
• On other people's messages. You can ask who read your message, never who read somebody else's.
• On a message that is still sending, and on system lines such as "Bob joined the group".

At the time of writing (October 2026), Telegram shows who read a message only in groups of up to 100 members and only for a week, and WhatsApp shows who read a group message, and when, in its message info. Iron Messenger keeps the names for as long as the message exists, in every group, and follows each reader's last-seen setting for the times. Our comparison with Telegram and WhatsApp covers the other differences, and group chats without the chaos covers the tools that keep a busy group readable.