To find a safe space for his kid to chat during Minecraft, Brian Scott had to go back to the future.
The chat went back, that is, to an IRC-like interface, run through a terminal. The connection and setup remain futuristic, because Scott used Tailscale, and tsnet, to build chat-tails.
Chat-tails is the opposite of everything modern chat apps are offering. Nobody can get in without someone doing some work to invite them. All the chats are ephemeral, stored nowhere easy to reach, unsearchable. There are no voice chats, plug-ins, avatars, or images at all, really, unless you count ASCII art. And that’s just the way Brian wanted it.
“It’s about, hey, you have this private space, across your friends’ tailnets, where you can chat, about the game you’re playing or whatever you’re doing,” Scott told me. “It’s supposed to be more like the days where you were all on the same LAN, you would bring your computers together and have a gaming session. Now you can kind of have that same type of feeling, no matter where you are in the world—just a nice private area where you can chat.”