Say hello with your thumbs.

Typing is the lowest-stakes way to open a conversation with a stranger, which is exactly why it is built into every match rather than parked somewhere else on the site.

No separate room waits to be joined and no public board scrolls past with names on it. The box is yours and theirs alone while the pairing lasts, and it vanishes when the pairing does.

It earns its place in three situations: when the camera feels like too much too soon, when the connection is too weak for smooth video, and when something needs to be spelled rather than said.

Random video chat has a first-ten-seconds problem: two people staring at each other while both wait for the other to speak. Text sidesteps it. Someone types something small, the silence breaks, and the call has a reason to continue.

It also keeps the site usable on a bad night. Weak signal, a noisy room, someone asleep in the next bed — none of those have to end the conversation when typing is right there.

What text is not here is a messaging app. There is no inbox, no history and no way to reopen a thread later. That absence is deliberate rather than unfinished — a random chat that archives everything you typed at a stranger is the worse product.