The New Internet

I love Tailscale, but this post gives me the creeps. The internet succeeded because it was built on standards and was completely free. With Tailscale, I get wireguard is open source and we have things like Headscale. But the whole everyone gets an IP, doesn’t it depend on Tailscale owning a massive ip address space? We can all wait until full ipv6 rollout, or we can depend on centralized ipv4, and servers and proprietary stuff. Maybe a bit hypocritical?

You can self-host a Tailscale control sever with Headscale[1]. It's not quite at feature parity with Tailscale, but it supports most if not all the current feature set and its improving every day. One of the lead devs is even paid by Tailscale to work on it, IIRC.

I run it for my personal self-hosted infra, and it works really well. Setting a custom control server URL is relatively easy (at least on Windows and Android which I use).

I use taildrop, I serve docker containers to the tailnet, etc. headscale works really well and is worth a go.

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

The question is: how long will Headscale be supported in the official clients - how long will the incentives of Tailscale's VC's align with the freeloaders?

The official clients (most valuable: the polished mobile apps easily installed from the default app stores) are one auto-update away from cutting ties when push comes to shove, the same as all commercial VPNs with a free tier.