Text Chat with Strangers

You open Who's online, tap a person and send them a message from their profile. That is the whole route: three taps and a sentence. You go in as a guest, so there is no sign-up form between you and the list, and your camera stays off the entire time.

If you are halfway between shy and curious, there is a gentler version of video too: start a match and type in the call instead of talking. How that message box works, and how typed lines are translated, is on the text chat page. This page stays with the first route, because it is the one that needs a little skill.

Not in the strict sense, and you should know that before you spend time here. On ChitChat the random match is a video match. There is no button that drops you into a typed-only conversation with a randomly chosen person.

What you get instead is close to it, with one difference: you do the choosing. Who's online is a list that never sits still. People arrive and leave by the minute, so the faces at the top now are not the ones you will see after dinner. If you like the surprise, you can keep it with a simple rule: open the list, take the third person you see without reading further, and write to them. Do it again tomorrow and it will be somebody new.

The trade is this: you give up the instant, blind pairing. You gain the chance to glance at a profile first, which means your opening line can be about something real, and the person you wrote to is still findable afterwards instead of vanishing when the window closes.

In Who's online. It is one tap from every page: the button at the top on a computer, the bar at the bottom on a phone. Each card is a real person who is on the site at that moment.

You can view the list by country, which is useful in two situations. If you want an easy conversation, look at places where your own language is spoken. If you would rather hear about somewhere you have never been, pick a country and start there. Either way, open two or three profiles before you write. Ten seconds of looking gives you the one detail that makes a first message land.

Something that could only have been sent to that person, and that ends in a question they can answer in one line. A first message has a single job, which is to make replying easier than ignoring. Compare these.

Write anyway. Messages are translated automatically, so a different alphabet is no reason to skip a profile. Use whole, plain sentences and it holds up well; the text chat page explains what the translation can and cannot do.

Write to someone else. No reply usually means the person is in a call, has stepped away or has closed the tab, and none of those is about you. A stranger owes nobody an answer, and that includes you when you are on the receiving end.

What you should not do is send the second, third and fourth message. A stack of "hello?" and "you there?" turns a neutral silence into a firm no. Send one good message, then move down the list. If they answer an hour later, you can pick it up from there.

Answer what they said before you ask anything new. It sounds obvious, and it is the step most people skip: they have a list of questions ready and fire the next one regardless. A reply that shows you read theirs ("no way, I had that exact dish last year") does more than three fresh questions.

Then give something of your own. A conversation where one side only asks feels like an interview. Trade a detail for a detail: they told you what they do in the evenings, so tell them what you were doing ten minutes ago. Keep your messages about the length of theirs. If they write one line and you write six, the weight of the chat tips over.

And let it be light. Nobody needs your life story by the fourth message. The aim of a first text chat is a second one.

When the typing starts to feel slower than the conversation. If you are both sending three messages at a time and laughing, you have run out of what text can do. Say so plainly: "this would be easier out loud, want to switch?"

The switch is simple. Every profile has a video call button, so you can call the person you have been writing to without going back to the random match. If they would rather keep typing, keep typing. You never have to turn the camera on at all.

Follow them. A followed person goes into your following list, and from that list their profile is a tap away. Without the follow you would be relying on spotting them in Who's online again, which is a gamble.

One practical note. A guest session belongs to the browser you are using. If you have found someone you really do want to keep texting, sign in so that they come with you to a new phone; ChitChat login explains what an account is for, and how ChitChat works covers following.

Almost anyone can do it, but a few kinds of people get more out of it than they expect.