Overview

Stream Chat provides a variety of channel management APIs that allow you to control how channels behave within your application. This page provides an overview of the different channel management operations available.

Overview

Channel management operations can be broadly categorized into:

Operation	Description	User Impact	Data Impact
Archiving	Mark a channel as archived for a specific user	Per-user state	No data loss
Pinning	Mark a channel as pinned for a specific user	Per-user state	No data loss
Muting	Suppress notifications for a channel	Per-user state	No data loss
Hiding	Hide a channel from query results until new messages	Per-user state	Optional history clear
Disabling	Prevent all client-side access to a channel	All users affected	No data loss
Freezing	Prevent new messages and reactions	All users affected	No data loss
Truncating	Remove messages from a channel	All users affected	Message data deleted
Deleting	Permanently remove a channel	All users affected	All data deleted

Choosing the Right Operation

Per-User Operations

These operations only affect the individual user and are ideal for personal organization:

Archiving: Use when a user wants to declutter their channel list but keep the channel accessible
Pinning: Use when a user wants to prioritize certain channels at the top of their list
Muting: Use when a user wants to stay in a channel but not receive notifications
Hiding: Use when a user wants to temporarily remove a channel from view

Channel-Wide Operations

These operations affect all users in the channel and typically require admin or moderator permissions:

Disabling: Use when you need to completely block access to a channel (e.g., for moderation)
Freezing: Use when you want to preserve a channel's content but prevent new activity (e.g., archived discussions)
Truncating: Use when you need to clear message history but keep the channel active
Deleting: Use when a channel is no longer needed and should be permanently removed

Server-Side vs Client-Side

Most channel management operations can be performed from both client-side and server-side SDKs, but some operations are restricted to server-side only for security reasons:

Operation	Client-Side	Server-Side
Archiving	✅	✅
Pinning	✅	✅
Muting	✅	✅
Hiding	✅	✅
Disabling	❌	✅
Freezing	✅	✅
Truncating	❌	✅
Deleting	Depends on permissions	✅