Chat-tails: Throwback terminal chat, built on Tailscale

Looking forward to hearing Tailscale getting forced to do age verification and banning use of this to people under 16 years old in Australia under their new social media rules...

Things like this make me wish there was a sort of public version of Tailscale where everyone got a routable IP address to everyone else no matter what kind of firewall they were behind. Like the old days of the internet, I guess.

Kept trying to build it in a variety of ways. Ultimately its a Dev niche thing which maybe in the hands of tailscale will gain adoption but really struggled otherwise. There's definitely room for private ephemeral conversations but I think that can also be a more public utility. Who knows, maybe it lays the foundation for that.

When I was a kid people were either there willing to communicate or AFK, the dynamic was completely different, and so were the expectations.

I enjoyed messaging much more although it would be impractical for me nowadays due to moving to a different time zone.

Looks fun, but couldn't you just host an actual IRC server behind Tailscale?

You may also enjoy https://typeto.me/ (discussed 15 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916453 ), a web version of talk/ntalk/ytalk

I'm gonna need an app for that . No, I just tried it. Works as advertised. Thank you for the dockerfile. Using putty, the formatting is messed up.on the banner/help. Must be some dynamic end of line thing. Still works so.

This is great, I've been looking for an easy to use local chat app for me and my kids, and Adium on Bonjour has been flaky with my VLAN setup at home. Will have to give this a try...

So IRC, but with easier to set up severs?

I don't want to be that guy, but I have to ask: this is ephemeral, unauthenticated chat for a handful of people over netcat. Why does it pull >1GB of dependencies?

this reminds me of gopher chats

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