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?

If you had to move off of tailscale, what would you move to?

Zerotier is I think the obvious answer? I haven't used it though; it's more proprietary, not less.

AFAIK, Zerotier is about equally proprietary, more-free (as in beer), and has been doing the node-to-node mesh thing instead of spoke-and-hub longer than Tailscale has been in existence.

And if I remember correctly, ZT was initially created to provide something like this "New Internet" concept that Tailscale has apparently recently discovered, except they called it "Earth" and abandoned it in 2023.

(Some things don't change, I guess.)

Tailscale does p2p, not hub-spoke, with additional DERP system which combines various NAT bypasses with worst case hair pinning over HTTPS - you can host all components yourself.