Chat-tails: Throwback terminal chat, built on Tailscale

Posted by nulbyte 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by bigiain 2 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...

Comment by wkat4242 2 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

Comment by wkat4242 2 days ago

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

Comment by subscribed 2 days ago

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

Comment by wkat4242 1 day 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.

Comment by nickdothutton 1 day 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.

Comment by LeoPanthera 2 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.

Comment by c45y 2 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.

Comment by theknarf 1 day ago

https://veilid.com/

Comment by VikingCoder 2 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...

Comment by jwrallie 1 day 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.

Comment by asim 1 day 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.

Comment by dmd 2 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

Comment by lorenzo95 2 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.

Comment by jmole 2 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...

Comment by theknarf 1 day ago

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

Comment by webdevver 1 day 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.

Comment by acheong08 1 day 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)

Comment by cl3misch 1 day 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?