Ask HN: What's a simple easy way to chat online with someone professionally?

I made a new acquaintance online who I want to chat with. Right now we are talking on Twitter because there seems to be no other way to chat?

Here are the other options and why I am not using them:

- Email: Don't want to give out my email to someone I just met since it has my fullname and is permanent.

- Whatsapp, Telegram: Requires a phone number.

- Discord: Dear God, no.

- Slack: Read above.

- LinkedIn: Mountains of spam.

All I want is a simple clean (substack like clean) chat interface with mobile apps where I can create an account really fast with a username and is professional looking so I can talk to people regarding slightly more serious topics instead of memes.

Is there any such service?

tucaz · 3 years ago

It sounds like there are a lot of simple options out there and you just don’t want to use them because “God, no”.

ilrwbwrkhv · 3 years ago

I mean discord and slack are really heavy. I want to start talking in less than 5 seconds.

grozzle · 3 years ago

I use nine active email addresses for various contexts. Some have all or part of my real name, some don't. The Gmail app can add accounts from various non-Gmail platforms, and still aggregate them all together. Sometimes I've made a new Gmail account just for more free Drive storage, when I used to host some of my music collection there and stream to my phone, before I made my home storage accessible via duckdns.

Just make a new account for this situation. There are myriad free or low-cost email providers. This is a trivially easy solution.

silisili · 3 years ago

Wire is pretty good as far as chat apps go. But for discoverability it's gonna require either an email or phone number I think.

But if email is an option, why not just spend the 10 seconds it takes to open a new gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc account?

noman-land · 3 years ago

For anyone who is not familiar, you can buy phone numbers from Twilio for $1 a month. You can use these for all sorts of things like giving to websites for shipping notifications, opening Telegram accounts, etc.

the_only_law · 3 years ago

I’ve noticed a lot more apps recently rejecting VOIP numbers sadly, particularly for account verification/2fa.

elviejo · 3 years ago

If you have your own domain you could create thousands of fake email accounts that just forward to your real email.

For extra security have two domains one for the fake accounts and the other for your real email

ilrwbwrkhv · 3 years ago

But in that case the other person also needs to commit to using their real email.

And creating fake emails are a bit of a pain.

BreathHiker · 3 years ago

You could try xx.network. In my experience, however, it is especially difficult to let others use a new app in addition to all the other variants that people often already have.

tomcam · 3 years ago

Sincere question. How could a chat server deal with misuse if they didn’t require email or phone? I am assuming you also want it to be free?

ilrwbwrkhv · 3 years ago

I wouldn't mind paying a small amount every month for it honestly. If it just did chat and was really light and fast.

tomcam · 3 years ago

I would too. I think we are a tiny minority though.

toomuchtodo · 3 years ago

I suggest WhatsApp or Signal for this use case.