Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

One fun use case: a coworker just whipped up this Minecraft mod using tailcat as its transport: https://github.com/tailscale/tailcat-for-minecraft (just a cute demo, not intended for release or ongoing maintenance)

So this is somewhat similar to Iroh? https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?

The Tor network and Onion protocols used to be used for this type of thing 10 or 15 years ago, exposing a home service with a .onion address and then gaining secure private access over the global internet infrastructure that way. But I haven't even seen any Tor related headlines for ages.

It looks like a direct competitor for the recently launched bitbang-cli https://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli