About HeyLust

Where HeyLust comes from

LustAI started as a small independent team building tools for talking to people online: a Telegram bot for one-tap anonymous text chat, an encrypted Mini App for random video and voice, and a blog of plain-language guides about meeting someone new. HeyLust is what those pieces became once they were put together and given a name of their own. The bot is @heylustbot; the Mini App and this site live at heylust.app.

Nothing here is owned by a larger company. The people who write the code also answer support, review reports and write the blog. That is a deliberate choice, not a stage we are trying to grow out of: a platform about freedom of communication should not answer to anyone except the people using it.

The problem we set out to solve

Most of the places people talk online today belong to a handful of very large platforms. Each of them decides who you can reach, what you can say, which parts of yourself are acceptable to show, and what happens to the record afterwards. Those rules are rarely written for you; they are written for advertisers, regulators and the platform itself. Over time people learn to self-censor, to keep a public voice and a private one, and to be a little afraid of the room they are in.

That is the problem HeyLust exists to answer. We do not think the answer is a lawless room. We think it is a room where the person in it, not the building, decides what happens: what they talk about, how much of themselves they show, and when the conversation ends.

You decide, every time

HeyLust is not a service for one kind of conversation. Some people come to practise a language, some to argue about films at two in the morning, some to talk about things they cannot say to anyone who knows their name, and some for an adult conversation between adults. All of those are the point. The rule that binds them is simple: nothing is pushed on you, and nothing is taken off the table for you either.

• Nothing forced. You pick text, voice or video before you are matched; your camera and microphone are never switched on for you. Any chat ends the moment you tap Next, no explanation needed.
• Explicit content is opt-in, not default. An on-device classifier blurs and skips explicit cameras automatically, and photos sent in text chat arrive covered until you choose to reveal them. Turning any of that off is your decision alone.
• Wide choice, not a narrow funnel. Interest tags, same-language matching, region and gender filters, text, voice or video: you shape who you meet. When you set no preference, the match is random, the way it should be.
• Your identity stays yours. Strangers never see your name, username, phone number or Telegram ID. If you want a conversation to continue outside, the /link command reveals your username on purpose, to that one person, in that one chat.

Why meeting a stranger still matters

Recommendation feeds are very good at showing you more of what you already like. A stranger is the opposite of a recommendation: someone with a different accent, a different week, a different set of assumptions, who has no reason to flatter you and no history with you to protect. Ten minutes with a person like that can teach you something about yourself that a year of scrolling never will.

Curiosity is a habit, and it is one that closed, optimised platforms quietly train out of people. Bringing back the plain experience of talking to someone you did not pick, and being surprised by them, is the reason HeyLust exists. The LustAI blog is where we write about that side of it: how to start a conversation, how to keep it kind, and how to look after yourself along the way.

What centralised random chat got wrong

For fourteen years the best-known place to meet a stranger was Omegle. It ended in November 2023, and the way it ended is instructive. By its last years the site logged IP addresses, kept records of chats and screenshots for moderation, and banned people by the network they connected from. Those measures were understandable responses to real abuse, but they meant the private conversation you thought you were having was neither private nor yours, and the only defence against abuse was more surveillance of everyone.

The deeper weakness was structural. One company owned the room, so one decision closed it, for everyone, the same day. That is the pattern of every centralised platform: the more it grows, the more it has to control, and the more its users are treated as risks to be managed rather than adults to be trusted.

How we do it differently

• Accountability without surveillance. Bans are tied to a Telegram account, not to an IP address, so a person who is reported cannot reconnect from a new network, and honest people are not logged just in case. Reports are one tap, and repeated ones lead to suspensions and permanent bans.
• Nothing to read, nothing to leak. Mini App chats are end-to-end encrypted on your device (ECDH P-256 key exchange, HKDF, AES-256-GCM; DTLS-SRTP for calls). Message, photo and video content never touches our servers, and the small session records that do exist delete themselves after 72 hours.
• No feed, no profile, no advertising model. There is nothing to optimise for engagement, because there is no timeline to keep you on. The free service is complete; Basic and VIP are one-time purchases that never auto-renew.
• Adults only, and honest about it. The service is for people aged 18 and over. Our terms and privacy policy say exactly what we do and do not store, in ordinary language, and we would rather lose a feature than break that promise.

We are not free of every dependency. HeyLust runs inside Telegram, which gives us identity, delivery and payments without ever asking you for a phone number, an email address or a password. It also means Telegram’s own terms apply alongside ours. We chose that trade-off with open eyes, and we say so here rather than pretend otherwise.

How to verify it is really us

LustAI is not affiliated with Telegram, Omegle, Chatroulette or any of their successors. Our only official channels are the domain heylust.app, the Telegram bot @heylustbot, the X account @lustaiofficial and the email [email protected]. The bot’s Telegram profile links back to this site, and this site links back to the bot; anything else claiming to be HeyLust or LustAI is not us.

Questions, corrections and press requests go through the contact page. If something on this page is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it and change the date above.