About Sri Lankan Chat
Sri Lankan Chat is a free, browser-based chat community for people who speak Sinhala, Tamil, English, or any combination of the three. We exist to give the Sri Lankan diaspora and people back home a calm, well-moderated place to talk in real time without paying for an app, downloading an installer, or handing over a phone number.
Our story
Sri Lankan Chat started in 2020 as a small side project. The original goal was simple: build a chat room that could load on slow mobile connections, render Sinhala unicode correctly, and let two friends in different time zones meet in the same room without setting up an account. Word spread through family groups and university WhatsApps, and the room kept filling up. Today the platform serves thousands of conversations every week between users in Colombo, Kandy, Jaffna, Galle, and Sri Lankan communities in Australia, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Gulf, and beyond.
Although the technology has changed several times since launch, the original principles have not. The site stays free for casual visitors. Public rooms are open to everyone. Registered users get extra features like custom circles, avatars, and email notifications, but no feature is locked behind a paywall.
What you can do here
Public chat rooms
Drop into open rooms organised around topics, regions, and language preferences. No account needed to start reading or to send your first message as a guest.
Personal circles
Verified members can create one private circle for friends or family, share an invite link, set a password, and decide who can upload media.
Sinhala unicode support
Type in Sinhala unicode out of the box, and convert legacy fonts to readable unicode using our built-in tool when you copy text from old sites.
Real-time messaging
Messages stream in instantly through web sockets. The interface is light enough to run on older phones and on patchy mobile data.
Media sharing
Share photos and short clips inside rooms when the room owner allows it. Each room can choose its own upload rules independently.
Active moderation
Profanity filters, account verification, and a small moderation team work together to keep public rooms civil and safe to use.
Who Sri Lankan Chat is for
The community is built around Sri Lankans, but the doors are open to anyone who wants to take part respectfully. Most users fall into a few familiar groups:
- Migrants and expats who want to keep speaking Sinhala or Tamil with people back home, share news from their adopted countries, and meet others on the same path.
- Students who use the rooms to practise English, ask homework questions, talk through life away from family, and just hang out between lectures.
- Friends and old classmates who lost touch and now use private circles as a low-effort group chat that does not depend on owning a particular phone or app.
- People learning the language who want a friendly room to practise reading and writing Sinhala unicode without judgement.
What we believe in
A chat room is a small piece of public space, and the people who run it set the tone. We try to set ours around four principles:
- Respect first. Every user starts on equal footing regardless of religion, ethnicity, gender, age, or language. Users who try to break that respect lose access to the rooms.
- Privacy by default. We collect the minimum amount of data needed to run the service. We never sell user information. Read our Privacy Policy for details on what is collected and why.
- Open in spirit, but not unmoderated. Public rooms are open, and the moderation team is small but consistent. We rely on users reporting abuse, and we act on it.
- Lightweight and accessible. The site loads on old browsers, slow connections, and small screens. Accessibility is a feature, not an afterthought.
How the service works under the hood
Sri Lankan Chat is a Open-source framework based web application served over HTTPS. Real-time messages travel over secure client-based runtime connection and optionally secure web socket connections so that you do not have to refresh the page to see new replies. Media uploads are scanned, resized, and stored on our own servers. We use cookies for session management and, with your consent, for anonymous usage analytics that help us improve performance and reliability. Detailed information lives in our Cookie Policy.
The site is hosted on infrastructure run from outside Sri Lanka and is governed by the laws applicable to the host country, alongside Sri Lankan law where relevant to user conduct. We comply with lawful requests from authorities and cooperate with platforms when child safety or serious harm is involved.
How to reach us
If you have feedback, a bug to report, a moderation concern, a press question, or a partnership idea, please use the contact page. The same form covers privacy, terms, and account questions; we read every message and reply when a reply is needed.
Visit the chat