Chat-tails: Throwback terminal chat, built on Tailscale

bigiain 152 days ago |

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...

wkat4242 152 days ago | |

Don't worry, VPNs are next in line to be banned anyway due to their big evasion potential of all this age verification nonsense

wkat4242 152 days ago | | |

ps just as I wrote this the English had to prove my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46294780

subscribed 152 days ago | | |

Ssh and ssl/tls without licence will be next :)

wkat4242 152 days ago | | |

Personally, I think they will go for the endpoint instead. This is part of the UK proposal now. Only allow "trusted" endpoints to access services, something which is kinda in place in the mobile world already. Many things are blocked if you are running an unsanctioned build of Android.

Then once they have that in place they can just do all the monitoring through the screen of the device itself, since all content has to pass through there.

It's much easier to do that than to try to mandate a backdoor to every service in the world. Of coruse it is even more disastrous to user privacy but I honestly think that's the goal not the bug.

nickdothutton 152 days ago | | |

Not being able to control the endpoint, like an operator can with a mobile phone, infuriates the police and politicians here. I don't want to go "full Stallman" here but although they do not use exactly these words... the idea of a general purpose computer you own and can program bothers them. Ironically at the same time they want a tech industry and tech jobs and young people entering the workforce with "tech skills". Keep in mind though that until relatively recently they though "tech skills" was being able to us MS Word. Thankfully the RPI helped a bit with that.

LeoPanthera 152 days ago |

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.

c45y 152 days ago | |

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ for the most part enables this - otherwise I2P and Tor for the most part facilitate this with the bonus encryption element.

We might one day have it natively with ipv6 adoption increasing.

theknarf 152 days ago | |

https://veilid.com/

VikingCoder 152 days ago | |

I think Tailscale shares is what we currently are supposed to use?

You share some "semi-public" host with all of your friends...

And then you're not necessarily chatting with famous people, but you can have a near-and-dear-social network of people you actually know...

jwrallie 152 days ago |

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.

asim 152 days ago |

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.

dmd 152 days ago |

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

lorenzo95 152 days ago |

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.

jmole 152 days ago |

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...

theknarf 152 days ago |

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

webdevver 152 days ago | |

irc has a very low return on investment. crazy amount of tinkering for what is ascii characters vaguely thrown in your direction. it clearly has cultural staying power (and it does act as a strong filter for technically-minded people), but a oneliner chatroom in your terminal is a fun option for both newbies who get easily intimidated, and pros who dont have much free time anymore.

_lvbh 152 days ago | | |

IRC with Ergo + Soju is pretty easy and pleasant. Barely spent 20 minutes setting up a server, bridge, and bouncer. Has been really helpful where bandwidth was an issue (I am writing as I stay in a city with only 500kbps internet where Discord and other heavy webapps straight up refuse to load)

cl3misch 152 days ago |

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?

kunley 152 days ago | |

Looking at the go.mod, tailscale lib seems to be the offender

misterthp 152 days ago |

this reminds me of gopher chats

pmdr 152 days ago |

So IRC, but with easier to set up severs?