Why I rebuilt ChessChat app

I found about chesschatapp the way most people did. I was lying in bed scrolling Instagram reels at some hour and stumbled across this reel.
A guy connects. That Discord join sound plays. He sees his opponent, laughs and says something about her being a girl.
I didn't even finish the reel fully. I typed chesschat.app into my browser and started playing.

Instagram Reel Link: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DY52o0ySOR7/

Is this same as chesschat.app?

No. This is a different project, run by me, not affiliated with chesschat.app in any way. I'm not the original team and this isn't an official replacement for anything.
I was just a user who liked it. When it went down I tried messaging their Instagram to ask what happened and never got a reply. So I built my own version instead. That's the whole story.

What the original was

Whoever made chesschat.app got something right. You clicked once. It found you a stranger. Their face appeared, your board appeared and you played. That was it. No adding friends, no scheduling a game, no lobby. Just a person.
They also marketed it properly. The reels did the heavy lifting and the app name was plastered everywhere in them, so when one went viral people knew exactly where to go. I was one of those people.
It was extremely buggy though. Let's be honest about that. It glitched, sometimes it won't let you move when your opponent had already moved and every so often it would pair you with the same person multiple games in a row like it had run out of humans. Nobody cared much, because there was nothing else that did this. It only had 3 mins time control though. You would pick a time control and then find match. A lot of people didn't like this.

Why I missed it

Chess is a loud game. It always was.
Go to any park where people actually play and you'll hear it. Someone talking through your clock, someone leaning over the board with an opinion nobody asked for, someone laughing at a blunder. That noise isn't a distraction from chess, it's most of the fun.
Then you open a chess site online and there's nothing. A username, a clock, silence. You finish the game and you'll never know one single thing about the person you just spent ten minutes with.
On chesschat.app I played someone from Iran who had grown up in the States. I played guys from Morocco, Algeria, Iraq. Half the time we barely had a shared language and it still worked, because you don't need much vocabulary to laugh at someone hanging a queen. I'd log on for one game and lose an hour.
Then one day it showed "no deployment found."
I refreshed. Came back the next day, refreshed again. Gave it a week. It never came back.

What I built differently

I sat with it for a while, then figured somebody should keep the idea alive. So I built chesschat.live.
Same promise. Click, get a stranger, see their face, play.
Because I'd actually played on it a lot, I knew exactly where it fell short.
The complaint everyone had was the time control. Three minutes, always, no choice. And I'm fairly sure that wasn't laziness, it was deliberate. The moment you let people pick a time control, you've split your player pool. Now someone who wants 10 minutes has to wait for another person who also wants 10 minutes and on a small platform that's a long wait staring at a spinner. One time control keeps everyone in the same queue and everyone gets matched fast. It's the safe call.
So I flipped the order. Pair people completely at random first, then let the two of them agree on the time control once they're already face to face.
It sounds like nothing. It's a small change in sequencing. But it's the thing that makes multiple time controls possible without wrecking your queue, because you never split the pool in the first place. You're two humans looking at each other and deciding whether you want three minutes or ten takes about four seconds.
That one is the piece I'm proudest of and I've noticed it turning up elsewhere since.
The rebuild isn't a clone with better paint. It's built properly this time. It works on a desktop, on a tablet and on a phone and it works the same on all three, which sounds like a low bar until you've tried to play blitz on a site that clearly had a laptop in mind.
That's really what most of the work went into. Not features, just making sure the thing doesn't get in the way of the game.

Where it's at right now

As I'm writing this there are 460+ people signed up (Email Verified Users), 41 of them in the last day and 115 games played in the last 24 hours.
Small numbers but they're real and every one of those games was two people looking at each other across a board.

What's next

Rooms and tournaments so you can bring your own people instead of only strangers, spectating and more camera features for anyone who wants to stream it. If there's something you want, the Discord is the fastest way to reach me and I read it most days.
This one's for the chess community and for everyone who was on chesschat.app before it disappeared. It was a great idea. It shouldn't have ended on a failed deploy.
Come play a game. Say something to your opponent for once.