Free chat rooms with people in them.

One, for now: General. It is made of the people in it rather than of a list someone wrote in advance, and the count on its card is the real one.

Your country shows as a flag next to your nickname, detected from the connection on the server, never from anything you type. Rooms for single countries are not open yet.

This is why the rooms page never shows a long list of empty rooms. A room you can see is one you can enter right now, with the real count on it. That rule is stricter than most chat sites, and it is the reason a room here is never a dead end.

A room is a text stream: messages from everyone in the room, each passing a word filter, an under-18 safety check and rate limits, with Report on every message.

There is no voice in rooms. Voice on HearMe is the private one-to-one call only, so a room is a place to read and type at your own pace, with no host and no queue to wait for. If you never want to write, you never have to. Reading for an hour is a normal way to be in a room.

1. Open /chat-rooms. You see General and the real count of people in it.
2. Tap Enter room. No sign-up. Your nickname is the one you use everywhere on HearMe.
3. Read for a minute, then type. One line is enough to be part of it.
4. Leave whenever you like. Nothing you said stays attached to you.

Like everything else on HearMe, rooms have no daily limit and need no account.

A 1:1 match is a commitment: one person, your full attention, and the small pressure of keeping it going. A room is the opposite. You can be present without contributing, drop a line into a running conversation, and leave without anyone noticing. For a lot of people it is the easier first step on the site, and the 1:1 text chat or voice call comes later, once they have found their feet.

Rooms are also where you meet more than one person at once. If you are trying to make friends from other countries, General at 10pm London time has the UK awake, and the flags tell you who else is there.

A room's language is whatever the people in it are speaking. General is mostly English, with Hindi, Hinglish, Portuguese and everything else passing through in the same minute. The site's own interface is available in eight languages, and you can set it independently of the room you are in.

• Read the last few messages before you type. Rooms have a thread; joining it is easier than starting a new one.
• One message, not five. Rapid-fire lines from one person push everyone else off the screen on a phone.
• Report is on every message. Use it; a person reads them.

The same rules as everywhere else on HearMe apply, and a couple more. Text in rooms passes a word filter, an under-18 safety check and rate limits, and every message can be reported. Someone who is blocked cannot see your messages in a room, and you cannot see theirs. HearMe is for adults only, in rooms as in chats.