Headscale is great if you like networking fun, but that aside I'm not understanding why VC funding is such a black mark to the poster. Tailscale doesn't generate meaningful revenue streams as its early-stage, so it has to secure funding to continue operations until they achieve high enough revenue to go public. That's pretty standard in a business life-cycle, though. It seems like the main complaint is that Tailscale is a business. And what about the Linux Foundation? They are funded through private equity. Should you consider switching away because of that?
Just use normal wireguard, why do you need tails or heads at all?
Accessing your home network that is kept inside a NAT by your ISP, without you having to acquire an online server somewhere.
You really don't though. I use wireguard myself under the same scenario without issue. You just need to use some form of dynamic DNS to mitigate the potentially changing IP. Even if you're using Tailscale you'll still need to have something running a service all the time anyways, so may as well skip the proxy.
And here I am, still using OpenVPN in 2025 lol
Used to run OpenVPN. Tried Wireguard and the performance was much better, although lacking some of the features some might need/want fit credential-based logins etc
I can highly recommend Netbird selfhosted, it has SSO support, logins, complex network topologies, it uses wireguard under the hood and it's open source.
Yeah, OpenVPN definitely doesn't have light spec requirements 😅 thankfully hardware is unfathomably powerful these days.
Ok and?
I think I'll just keep using tailscale until they start enshittifying, and then set up a Headscale instance on a VPS - no need to take this step ahead of time, right?
I mean, all the people saying they can avoid any issues by doing the above - what's to stop Tailscale dropping support for Headscale in future if they're serious about enshitification? Their Linux & Android clients are open source, but not IOS or Windows so they could easily block access for them.
My point being - I'll worry when there is something substantial to worry about, til then they can know I'm using like 3 devices and a github account to authenticate. MagicDNS and the reliability of the clients is just too good for me to switch over mild funding concerns.
I just replaced my entire setup with base wireguard as a challenge, easier than I expected it to be, and not hard to mimic tailscale.
If you just have to talk from many devices to the one server sure, but Tailscale sure makes it easy for many to many. Also if a direct connection is impossible (e.g. firewall of china, CGNAT etc) tailscale puts a relay server in the middle for you.
Good thing I deleted it from my homeserver a month ago.
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