Hiya everyone! Thanks for checking out this thread.

See, I got my first computer when I was seven years old in 2000, and my favorite past-time back then (besides playing games and watching games-related videos on AOL) was going on chatrooms! Don't worry, they were child-friendly... At least in my first few years of surfing.

I loved chatrooms, I joined a lot of them and I enjoyed talking to a variety of people. Some mean, sure, some even scary, but most of them were really nice people. All my fellow students in Germany were on particular chatrooms, everyone had their favorite, and we'd visit each other's favorite sites just to hang out together and meet their Internet friends. I myself made some Internet friends back then that I still regularly talk to through Skype, and I got to know some people better who I knew IRL but that would otherwise be more quiet at school. Thing is, all of that kind of came to an end when I was around 13 or 14 (so 2007ish for me).

Sorry for the long context there, but considering that I feel just a tiny bit lonely nowadays (even though I work in an office full of people... But I am sure you know what I mean), I would just love to get back into a chatroom and have a chat with random people, and maybe even make some new friends. However, I went on Google and searched for chatrooms and... Well... None of them seem all too safe, and it all just looks a bit shady. Obviously, I don't want shady!

Are there any modern chatrooms out there? Any you visit? Or is the concept of chatrooms dead? The idea of anonymous people just talking to one another? Really, completely dead? It certainly seems that way... Is the only way to experience something like that again to play an MMORPG? I wouldn't mind doing that either, now that I think about it.... But still, that's my question and I'll stick to it!

Many irc channels are still active.

Discord. You're looking for Discord.
GOG has an official Discord channel and I think the forum still has an IRC, but both of those are kinda dead. I've PMed you PookaMustard's somewhat active unofficial channel which I frequent.

Discord appears to be more voice based, not a good idea for the office were the chap needs to be pretending to work.
It reminds me of all the time I wasted at Uni playing MUDs and MUSHes

Hm, I did a quick web-search, but it seems voice and video chat, along with modern social media sites, have replaced traditional chat rooms.

Aside from text-based instant messenger programs, I guess your best bet are forums such as this one.

Depends. On the server I frequent, it's more often text than voice, although we'll do the occasional voicechat with the pretense of playing games (when we're obviously just joining to screw around). Even while in voicechat, the text channel's still pretty active.

I still use IRC to communicate with some friends, but like everyone said, Discord is the new IRC, and is definitely not just for voice.

I met my last girlfriend on IRC. That was 23 years ago.

Now all the irc channels I go to are dead dead dead.

I'd love to shoot the shit about American football, baseball but I can't even find those channels.

I found the GOG irc channel. Oh yeah....MISTAKE! :P No disrespect to TheJoe/Tea who has seemed to mellow a bit and was actually quite respectful to me last time he was in here for real

I love IRC, and I loved chat servers like WBS and Yahoo Chat. There's still Yahoo Groups, and Google Circles and the like. But I get what the OP is talking about. Traditional chat rooms are pretty much gone. Maybe Reddit would be like what you're after. It's more of a message board, but it has several different topics for almost anything (including potato salad) and it's got a TON of people you've never met before.

Chatrooms are dead? That can't be. Gonna find a BBS and ask around...

I think that there 'facebook' web site still has a working chatroom? But everyone using that site always goes on about how much it suck and how they spend way too much time there, so ... :-/

Thank you, I'll check it out!

But pretty much what you're all saying is... The good old days of anonymous chatting are gone? It's a shame, I liked the Internet more when I didn't connect a real-life face to posts being made online. That's why I like this forum! I am so glad I joined gog.com and looked at the forums, this is as old-school as it gets (which is sad, because if what I remember is already 'old-school', then I can only imagine how some of you older folk must feel).

Social Media is just so much more inferior imo, just because it causes so many unnecessary problems with click-bait headlines, overindulgence in sharing everything you see, doing things IRL just to post it on social media sites, and the like. Online chatrooms were just isolated little lounges that didn't affect the way we act and interact in the real world all too much. Just my two cents I guess, sorry.

IRC networks are still alive, and Discord is the new place to be.

Skype sucks. It sucked before, but now there's an alternative.

I agree with that. While I don't use any of the social media for personal reasons (although I do have some experience in Twitter/Facebook as I've been managing accounts for professional purposes), I think that while social media can be helpful to many people in several ways, lots of people use them extensively just for the sake of using them, which wouldn't be a problem if these people actually didn't get addicted to them (who haven't been in a situation where a friend contantly checked their FB account during the time you were out for a coffee/beer?) or didn't rely on them to build their "image" (which, from what I've seen from friends and other people close to me, appears to be quite false a lot of times).

As for IRC, I kinda miss it; I grew up with it and have great memories of using it to actually meet people from all over the country (I've been lounging mainly in channels for metalheads) and get in touch with friends & bandmembers (mind you, there were no mobile phones back then).