Treat this as a starting point rather than a closed room. Curiosity about Malawi usually comes with curiosity about East Africa more broadly, and South Sudan or Mozambique are never more than a skip away once you get going.
Chewa is what you will hear most in Malawi, so a greeting in it goes a long way. Plenty of people are also keen to practise English on a real person rather than an app, and being patient with a learner is genuinely appreciated.
Time zones do most of the work in deciding who is awake. Malawi runs on UTC+2, so its 10pm is 9pm in Lagos and 12pm in Los Angeles, and evenings are when conversations stretch past the first question.
There is no charge. Every chat mode works the same for visitors from Malawi as for anyone else in East Africa, and none of them sit behind a paywall.
Nothing beyond the 18+ confirmation. Video and audio travel straight between the two browsers over WebRTC — the same in Malawi as anywhere else in East Africa — so there is no profile to create and no chat history attached to you.
Chats usually open in Chewa. A greeting in it changes the mood immediately, and after that most people are happy to work through the gaps in plain English.
Aim for the evening in Malawi. At UTC+2, 10pm local converts to 9pm for anyone in Lagos and 12pm in Los Angeles, which catches people winding down rather than heading out.