Show HN: Chatible – Anonymously Chat with Strangers in Facebook Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Chatible – Anonymously Chat with Strangers in Facebook Messenger

chatible.io

50 pointszaytoun20 comments

Hey HN, Chatible is a project I've been working on this past week. I wanted to explore the idea of using bots to connect humans together. I'd love any feedback.

A couple quick questions:

Does it require a Facebook account to use?

If so are my chats stored for later reference?

Is it text only?

Is it regional for connections, so I won't be paired with somebody from a different country?

1) It requires a Messenger account. (I believe FB decoupled FB and Messenger recently)

2) We don't store any messages on our backend.

3) We support text and stickers.

4) It's not regional. We pair you with random people throughout the world. However, if there's a demand for regional pairing, we will explore that as well.

Thank you. My reasoning behind #4 is that if I were matched with someone who doesn't speak English, it would be a very short chat.

For #1 all I know of is that Facebook and Messenger are separate mobile apps now. There's still just one kind of Facebook account.

I recently deleted my FB account. It asked me if I still wanted stop use messenger, which I did. Kept all of my contacts and previous message chains, if this helps inform anyone from anecdotal experience.

You can use Messenger without a Facebook account (just your phone number I think).

This. Only need your phone number to use the Messenger app.

There is an issue wth the images' size: they are very big, which makes the home page hard to read.

https://i.imgur.com/wYLfxXI.png

Oops, let me check that out. Thanks for letting me know.

It'd be interesting if you could connect humans who share an interest together. I feel like platform need to direct and steer the human conversations.

Yeah, I agree. We've already implemented that functionality, but right now we're brainstorming ways to roll it out without clunky UI. We want to keep it extremely simple to use for now.

Share this dev approach with Facebook proper and MAYBE I'll come back to the site.

You mean like Omegle without the dicks?

I'm surprised how easy it is to set up, since I already have the Facebook Messenger app on my mobile device. I actually thought it was am official Facebook service for a minute.

Neat, though I fear you've created an easy way for spammers to "connect" with people anonymously. How do you plan on dealing with bots using your bot?

Yeah, that's a reasonable concern. We haven't yet implemented anything to avoid spam, but that has been on our todo list. We have been thinking about giving users the ability to flag an account after their conversation ends. Maybe implement some sort of penalty system.

It's somewhat difficult to create tons of new Facebook accounts, so you can ride off this perk of Facebook to handle spam yourself. Flagging conversations is a good idea, so after three or so flags, you can automatically ban the account, and I think that would auffice.

So basically Omegle, but implemented on Facebook?

Not exactly :P Omegle had some chat servers of it's own but this one doesn't even need that :P it just has to relay messages hiding info

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