Friendly reminder that Tailscale is VC-funded and driving towards IPO
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
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.
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I'm not that worried as there are alternatives like Netbird. The underlying tech really isn't hard to replicate since Wireguard is pretty standard.
I think it would be cool if Tailscale made it into the enterprise arena.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think it would be cool if Tailscale made it into the enterprise arena.
I think they already have started. Telus is on their list of clients.
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Headscale is the tailscale backend server
Well not "the" backend server but "a" different backend server. As far as I know Headscale is a separate implementation from what Tailscale run themselves.
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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.
Yeah, as I said, it's a friendly reminder. I'm personally probably doing it this year. It's entirely possible that enshittification could come even years from now. It all depends on how their enterprise adoption goes I think. The more money they make there, the longer the individual users are gonna be left unsqueezed.
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Join our Discord server for a chat and community support.
Sigh...
And even worse:
Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.
Huh, I actually didn't know this because I don't use Windows/macOS/iOS. Somehow completely missed this.
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I get all of that. I really do feel ya. However, I find it quite difficult to raise my ire over a free product (Tailscale) that I use in conjunction with my hobby, changing up their game and going IPO. I guess I do not take my network as seriously as others here do.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Not so much ire than awareness and planning so we don't get caught pants down. I've been using them for 5 years, in part because their clients (for my OSes) are open source and there was a path out of their infrastructure. I paid for it and have a pretty elaborate setup which supports services for family and friends. I've been happy so far, but will be decoupling from their infrastructure. No ire for them, just for the system. The system makes people and firms do what they do.
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Netbird seemed to go in a similar way, though still good. I want to try zrok next, looks interesting
What do you mean by going in a similar way? Towards an IPO?
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Tailscale/headscale/wire guard is different from a normal vpn setup.
VPN: you tunnel into a remote network and all your connections flow through as if you’re on that remote network.
Tailscale: your devices each run the daemon and basically create a separate, encrypted, dedicated overlay network between them no matter where they are or what network they are on. You can make an exit node where network traffic can exit the overlay network to the local network for a specific cidr, but without that, you’re only devices on the network are the devices connected to the overlay. I can setup a set of severs to be on the Tailscale overlay and only on that network, and it will only serve data with the devices also on the overlay network, and they can be distributed anywhere without any crazy router configuration or port forwarding or NAT or whatever.
And on Unraid you can add individual docker containers to the tailnet too.
So you can just go ssh <container> on any device in the Tailnet and it’ll connect
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Vps can be really inexpensive, I pay $3 a month for mine
~$1.91 a month (paid 22.99 for a year) at racknerd!
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Join our Discord server for a chat and community support.
Sigh...
And even worse:
Everything in Tailscale is Open Source, except the GUI clients for proprietary OS (Windows and macOS/iOS), and the control server.
To be fair, anything the GUI clients do can be done with the CLI which is still open source and on all desktop platforms and headscale is literally their open source control server.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Headscale requires tailscale client so it’s a no-go for me. I’m still trying to block cloudflare from my network.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Yeah and steam is closed source DRM platform. Great software sometimes is worth the trade off.
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What do you mean by going in a similar way? Towards an IPO?
Maybe not ipo, but it seemed like it had a strong monetisation push a while ago
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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.
Any helpful guids or links you feel like sharing for interested parties?
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Yeah and steam is closed source DRM platform. Great software sometimes is worth the trade off.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Steam is a private company, not publicly traded and has no VC funding.
VC funding and potential IPO normally means enshittification is inevitable, as they will eventually need to make insane profits by turning the screws on its users, as their business model wasn't self sustaining.
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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.
Can you elaborate how?
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Can you elaborate how?
Pihole and pivpn get along like peas and carrots.
Make the "available ips" your pivpn subnet and ta-da, the mesh functionality of tailscale without the entire connection.
Want to exit node from the server? Just change the value back to 0.0.0.0/0.
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How does WG work on the local side of the network? Do you need to connect each VM/CT to the wireguard instance?
I am currently setting up my home network again, and my VPS will tunnel through my home network and NPM will be run locally on the local VLAN for services and redirect from there.
I wonder if there is any advantage to run NPM on the VPS instead of locally?
wrote last edited by [email protected]The vps is the wg server and my home server is a client and it uses pihole as the dns server. Once your clients hang around for a minute, their hostnames will populate on pihole and become available just like TS.
You do have to set available ips to wg's subnet so your clients don't all exit node from the server, so you'll be able to use 192.168.0.0 at home still for speed.
As for NPM, run it on the proxy, aim (for example) Jellyfin at 10.243.21.4 on the wg network and bam.
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Steam is a private company, not publicly traded and has no VC funding.
VC funding and potential IPO normally means enshittification is inevitable, as they will eventually need to make insane profits by turning the screws on its users, as their business model wasn't self sustaining.
Enshittification is inevitable for all free services (services as in with a server component). Thankfully the functions of tailscale are open source so until enshittification actually happens I will be happy with using a a useful but VC funded project. When I am not willing to make the trade off anymore I will use headscale or some other drop in replacement.
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Corporate VPN startup Tailscale secures $230 million CAD Series C on back of “surprising” growth
Pennarun confirmed the company had been approached by potential acquirers, but told BetaKit that the company intends to grow as a private company and work towards an initial public offering (IPO).
“Tailscale intends to remain independent and we are on a likely IPO track, although any IPO is several years out,” Pennarun said. “Meanwhile, we have an extremely efficient business model, rapid revenue acceleration, and a long runway that allows us to become profitable when needed, which means we can weather all kinds of economic storms.”
Keep that in mind as you ponder whether and when to switch to self-hosting Headscale.
Crap, I really need to switch of Tailscale but currently it is an easy way for me to access my stuff outside of home as a temporary solution while I am on a 5G modem.
