Random text chat with strangers

The simplest way to meet someone new

Text chat strips the format back to what it was originally: two people who have never met, placed in a private room, typing to each other in real time. No camera to point at yourself, no microphone to set up, no picture of your room in the background. For a lot of people this is the version they actually prefer — and it's how random stranger chat started, years before webcams were part of it.

It's also the most forgiving. You get a moment to think before you answer. You can chat from a quiet office, a lecture hall, a train, or bed at 2am without making a sound. And on a weak or metered connection it works when video simply wouldn't — a conversation costs a few kilobytes rather than a few megabytes a minute.

What makes text chat different

Something interesting happens when you take faces out of the equation: people talk about different things. Without appearance to react to, conversations skip past the usual first impressions and land on what someone actually thinks. Strangers will tell you about a problem they're stuck on, a country you've never been to, or an opinion they wouldn't say out loud to someone who could recognise them. The anonymity that makes stranger chat feel risky in video mode is exactly what makes it candid in text.

It's also the mode where language practice works best. If you're learning a language, typing gives you time to compose a sentence and look up a word without an awkward silence — and you can scroll back and reread what the other person wrote, which you can't do with speech.

Openers that actually get a reply

"hi" gets skipped. The problem isn't rudeness, it's that it gives the other person nothing to work with. Anything that hands them a specific thing to respond to does much better:

• Ask where they are and what time it is there — it's easy to answer and it opens the door to everything else.
• Ask what they're avoiding doing right now. Almost everyone on a stranger chat site is procrastinating something.
• Offer an opinion worth disagreeing with. A mild, low-stakes take gets far more engagement than a question.
• Say something true about your own day. Reciprocity works: people match the level of detail they're given.

And if none of it lands, hit Next. The format is built around the assumption that most conversations won't work, which takes all the pressure off the ones that do.

Staying anonymous while you type

Text is the most private of the three modes — nothing about your face, voice, or surroundings is transmitted. That still leaves what you type. Use a nickname rather than your real name, and be careful about details that add up: your school plus your first name plus your city is often enough to identify someone. Never share phone numbers, addresses, logins, or financial details, and be sceptical of anyone in a hurry to move the conversation onto another app.

When you're ready for more than text, voice chat adds sound without showing your face, and video chat gives you the full face-to-face version. There's more on keeping stranger chat safe on our safety page.