Tailgate: Private Groups, Posts and Discussions for Your Contacts

Group chats get noisy and lose everything important the moment it scrolls away. Public communities put your conversations on someone else's platform, next to strangers. Tailgate is Trevally's answer: your own private community (think a personal Reddit) built on the contacts you already have. Create groups, post updates with files and formatting, and hold real threaded discussions, all among people you actually know. This is the complete tour.

What is Tailgate?

Tailgate opens with your groups on the left and the selected group's feed on the right. Its tagline says it plainly: "Connect, discuss, and stay up to date with your community."

Each group is like a private subreddit or channel: a space with its own members, posts and discussions. Unlike a group chat, posts don't vanish up the scroll; unlike a public forum, everyone in the room is someone from your contact base.

Your groups, sorted by what's alive

The sidebar lists every group with its member count, message count and last-activity time. Search narrows a long list, and emoji in the names make them scannable at a glance.

Here's the detail that makes Tailgate feel alive: groups are ordered by their last activity. Post or comment in any group and it jumps to the top of the list. In the example below, "Family Group" (active 27 minutes ago) sits above "Trevally discussions" that last moved 2 days ago, even though the latter has far more messages. The conversation that just happened is always the one you see first.

Those dark badges are unread counts: Tailgate tracks what you haven't seen yet, per group, so nothing important slips past.

Creating a group

Click Create and you get a short form: a name, an optional description, the members, and one setting worth understanding.

Storage Responsibility is the hidden detail. Because members share files inside a group, Tailgate lets you decide up front who those files count against: the group owner's storage, or each member's own quota. Running a family album where you cover the space? Owner-funded. A work group where everyone pulls their weight? Per-member. It's a small choice that avoids an awkward conversation later.

Adding members from your contacts

You don't invite people by email address and wait. Tailgate's members come straight from your contact base. The Add Members picker is the same one that powers Courier, Kanban and Tasky: pick individual Contacts, whole Lists, or an entire import.

That means spinning up a group for "everyone on the client list" or "the whole cohort I imported" is a couple of clicks. The people are already organized. The group owner manages membership (add, remove, edit, delete); members can post, discuss and leave when they're done.

Writing a post

The composer is a proper rich editor, not a single-line message box. Start a post and you can write headers, lists, quotes and code blocks (type / for blocks), format inline with bold, italic and links, @mention other members, and attach files.

The result reads like a real post, not a lost chat line: a title, formatted body, and downloadable attachments that stay put:

Every post also tracks views and shows an unviewed indicator so members can see at a glance what's new since they last looked:

Reacting

Sometimes a post just needs a quick signal, not a paragraph. Tailgate's reactions are built for the way people actually encourage each other: a fist bump, a high five, a handshake, a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Discussions: the part that makes it a community

Reactions are the appetizer; discussions are the meal. Every post has a comment feed, newest first, where members write back, and each comment can be reacted to and replied to on its own.

Replies open a dedicated thread panel, so a side conversation about one comment stays attached to that comment instead of tangling the main feed. This is the Reddit-style structure that group chats never had: the main post, the top-level comments, and focused threads branching off each one.

Because comments count as activity, a lively discussion keeps its group pinned to the top of everyone's sidebar. The conversation pulls people back in on its own.

Nobody misses what matters

Two systems make sure an active community reaches its members even when they've closed the app:

• In-app notifications: the bell surfaces new posts and comments in your groups, grouped by group, one click from opening them:

• Email digests: Tailgate sends members a digest of unread posts and comments in their groups, and notifies anyone who was @mentioned while they were away, with sensible limits so nobody gets spammed. A conversation you're part of finds you, whether you're in Trevally or not.

Who is Tailgate for?

Anyone who needs a focused, private space for a specific group of people:

• Small teams: a standup channel, a bugs group, a release-updates group (exactly how the Trevally team uses it);
• Families: a private space for photos and plans that isn't a sprawling WhatsApp thread;
• Cohorts and clients: onboard a class, a mastermind or a client group from a contact list in one step;
• Communities: any circle where you want threaded discussion and shared files without handing your conversations to a public platform.

The through-line with everything else in Trevally: the community is built on your contacts, so the people are already there, already organized, already yours.

Start a group today

Pick a handful of people who keep ending up in the same scattered chat, give them a proper home, and post the first update. Tailgate turns a noisy thread into a real, searchable, reactable community, private by default.

Connect your inbox for free and start your first community.