tincan – peer-to-peer voice and text chat for the terminal

tincan is a terminal voice and text chat application for small peer groups. One participant opens the room and acts as coordinator for the roster, channels and chat, while voice traffic is exchanged between peers rather than being mixed by a tincan-operated central service.

It is intentionally different from account-based chat platforms, but it is not infrastructure-free. Peer discovery, NAT traversal and relay fallback currently depend on public services operated by Number Zero. Room members can also learn each other’s IP addresses, an important trade-off of the direct peer-to-peer design.

The coordinator keeps recent text chat in memory so somebody joining later can see what was said before they arrived. That history is not written to disk and disappears when the room closes.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Create rooms using a memorable room name and passphrase or a longer invite code based on the host’s public key.
• Carry voice over encrypted QUIC peer-to-peer connections, falling back to relays when direct connectivity cannot be established.
• Use Opus audio with resampling, loss concealment and per-peer jitter buffering.
• Keep text viewing and voice participation independent, so users can read one channel while speaking in another.
• Provide microphone mute, deafen, push-to-talk mode, per-person volume control and selectable input and output devices.
• Include RNNoise noise suppression on the microphone path with a runtime switch to disable it.
• Show whether links are direct or relayed and surface latency and audio dropout information when connections degrade.
• Use Argon2id and a keyed BLAKE2b proof for room admission while QUIC provides connection encryption.

Website: github.com/bilalyazicioglu/tincan-cli
Support:
Developer: Ahmet Bilal Yazıcıoğlu
License: MIT License

tincan is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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