Tailscale raises $100M

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work.

The biggest risk that this company has is that Cloudflare (in all reality) should just buy them or reimplement it. It’s the type of product cloudflare would make, that’s for sure. Being based on open source wireguard, and being just a STUN/TURN server at its core… I’m sure that Tailscale will be the first but maybe not the best.

I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

Web3 happens when people can host stuff on their phones, and Tailscale is something that lets you host things on your phone.

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network.

This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

What other benefits are there? I use a PiHole to block ads on my phone already, but I do it via a PiHole installed on an EC2 instance that I also use as an IRC bouncer and other things.

It means you can self host all kinds of things and never worry about opening a port on your router.

As long as you don't need to share any of your services with non-Tailscale users. Otherwise you'll need to set up some sort of public server.

But you can also try to get them to be Tailscale users and effortlessly share the devices with access control features they built. I share my home servers and game servers with family/friends easily while still keeping everything off the public internet.

But now your friends and family are locked into a proprietary system, subject to whatever the future incentives of Tailscale end up being. How many people can you connect on the free plan?

Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.

Headscale [1] allows one to implement a self-hosted, open source alternative to the Tailscale control server.

[1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Almost all of tailscale is opensourced at this point besides the GUI.