Back in college I used to spend hours on BBSes and it's a vibe that never really went away. Modern chat apps are fine but there's something about a terminal UI that just hits different.
So I built kirbus — a peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted terminal chat.
Some highlights:
- No accounts — your identity is a local Ed25519 keypair
- E2E encrypted — the server never sees message content
- Five retro themes (my favorite is the ANSI BBS one, naturally)
- Works on LAN or through relay servers
- Self-host your own server and registry
- pip install kirbus and kirbus --handle to try it.
GitHub: https://github.com/wehale/kirbus
Would love to hear what you think. It's still early but it works and it's been a blast to build.
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