Random chat, reinvented

Random chat is the simplest idea on the internet: press a button, meet someone you’ve never met, and see where the conversation goes. Gibbur keeps that spark — one click, one stranger, one-on-one text chat — and quietly fixes the parts that used to make random chat feel like a gamble you didn’t want to take.

What is random chat?

Random chat means you don’t pick who you talk to. There are no profiles to scroll, no photos to judge and no follower counts to compare. The site pairs you with another person who is also looking for a conversation right now, and the two of you start from zero.

That’s the charm. You might land on someone who loves the same obscure band, someone who lives eight time zones away, or someone who just wants to argue about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Every chat is a small surprise, and if it isn’t clicking, the next one is a click away.

On Gibbur, random chat is text chat. No camera, no microphone, no pressure to look a certain way. Video is something we may add later, but it isn’t here today — and honestly, a lot of people prefer words anyway.

How Gibbur’s random matching works

Here’s what happens between pressing the button and saying your first hello.

1. You confirm you’re 18+. The first time you visit /chat, you tick “I am 18 or older and agree to the Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.” Gibbur is for adults only.
2. Your browser gets a short-lived ticket. Behind the scenes, your browser receives a cryptographically signed, single-use ticket that’s valid for 60 seconds. It’s what lets you join the chat service — and it can’t be reused or forged.
3. The server finds your partner. The pairing decision happens on our server, not in your browser. That means nobody can tamper with the page to pick who they get matched with.
4. You start talking. Your messages are delivered only to your current partner, and every message is tagged with an ID for that specific chat. When you move on, nothing from the old conversation can leak into the new one.

All of this travels over encrypted connections (HTTPS and secure WebSockets with TLS), so the conversation is protected in transit. If you want the deep dive, How Gibbur works walks through it step by step.

One tab, one chat

Each browser tab is its own independent chat. Open two tabs and you can run two conversations at once — but Gibbur will never match your two tabs with each other, so you won’t accidentally end up talking to yourself.

Random matching vs. interest matching

Gibbur gives you two ways to meet people, and you can switch between them whenever you like.

Interest matching never leaves you stuck waiting. If nobody with a shared tag is around, the short fallback kicks in and you get paired with a random stranger. Want the full rundown, plus tips for choosing tags? Read chat by interests.

Skipping, stopping and starting over

Random chat only works if leaving is easy. On Gibbur, it is.

• New chat (skip): Ends the current conversation and immediately looks for someone new. Keyboard fans can press Esc twice.
• Stop: Ends the chat without looking for a new one, for when you need a break.
• Typing indicator: You’ll see when your partner is typing, so you know whether to wait for a reply or move on.
• Online count: Shows how many people are around, so you have a feel for how busy it is.

There’s no penalty for skipping a chat that isn’t working, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation. A quick “nice chatting, take care!” is a kind touch, though. To keep things fair for everyone, there are rate limits on how fast you can skip and reconnect — normal use won’t hit them, but bots that hammer the button will.

Reporting people who break the rules

Most strangers are just people looking for a good conversation. When someone isn’t, hit Report.

• When you report, we store the report details — the reason, the time, the chat ID and the IP addresses and account IDs involved, if any. We don’t store the message text with the report.
• People who are reported repeatedly can be automatically banned for a while.
• Moderators can view live conversations and recent messages to enforce the Community Guidelines, and can ban by IP, browser or account.

After reporting, just skip to a new chat. For anything serious, you can also email abuse@gibbur.com. The Safety Center has more on how moderation works.

Why random chat on Gibbur feels cleaner

The fastest way to ruin random chat is bots. Gibbur has several layers designed to make spamming expensive and annoying:

• Per-user rate limits on messages, skipping and connecting.
• A 1,000-character limit per message.
• Detection of the same message being flooded over and over.
• Links are blocked in the first few seconds of a chat — a classic bot move.
• A cap on connections per IP address and per browser.

None of that gets in the way of a normal conversation. It just makes life miserable for scripts that want to blast ads at strangers.

Random, anonymous and private

You show up as “Stranger.” Your partner never sees your name, email, IP address or account. You don’t need an account at all — but if you want to save a display name and your interests, a free account is optional.

Chat message text is never written to our database or to disk. A copy lives only in the chat server’s memory for up to 2 hours for moderation and spam fighting, then it’s discarded. Chats aren’t end-to-end encrypted — moderation requires the server to relay the text — and we’d rather tell you that plainly. The anonymous chat guide breaks down exactly what we see and what we don’t.

Tips for better random chats

• Open with something real. “hi” gets skipped. A question gets answered. Grab a few ideas from our conversation starters.
• Give a little to get a little. Share an opinion or a story, not just questions.
• Keep personal details to yourself. No full names, addresses, phone numbers or socials with someone you just met.
• Skip without guilt. Not every chat will click, and that’s the whole point of random.

Start a random chat

Random chat FAQ