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Comment by aidanhs | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda sad for you - I've been using and advocating zerotier for a while (it's amazing and indispensable)...but in my circles the word 'wireguard' has got people excited, which (anecdotally) is benefitting tailscale and generating more hype around them than zerotier ever got. Hopefully a rising tide will lift all ships and you find a way to capitalise on it :)

(I prefer device-based zerotier-style access rather than login-based tailscale-style so that does sway me to zerotier...but I have to admit tailscale looks more polished, e.g. the screenshot of seeing other devices on the network. I get it's not a fundamental feature! But I can't help but appreciate it)

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We are doing fine and V2 is coming soon with a ton of improvements. I just have to occasionally point out our existence again.

The pulldown showing other devices on a network does look spiffy but that wont scale. We have users with thousands of devices on a virtual LAN and the protocol will scale far larger. Not only will that not fit in a menu but any system that relies on a master list will fall down. That list and refreshing it will get huge.

We are doing the tech first, spiff second.

Some feedback. I think I stumbled upon Zerotier a while back and didn't really get what it is. IIRC it felt like something that is only useful for big companies, exactly what I felt today.

I think the website could do a better job showcasing how it's used.

Hope my feedback is helpful and wish all the best!

Our web site kind of sucks. We're going to be working with a design/marketing firm to re-do it soon.

It's kind of hard to explain ZeroTier sometimes. Its so simple (to the user) people have a hard time getting it.

"You just make a network and connect stuff." Huh?

People have been conditioned to think networking is hard because 90% of networking software is crap.

Thanks for ZeroTier! Managed to convert a few friends from using Hamachi for LAN games, which was always a pain to setup previously. It simply just works for my needs.

ooh! so it could replace Hamachi. I think this is one use case (without using the product name) that can be listed in a uses-cases page. Hope other Zerotier users would chime in with more use cases.

ZeroTier emulates a L2 Ethernet switch over any network, so anything you can do with Ethernet basically.

You make networks, add stuff to them, and any protocol you want just works: games, ssh, sftp, http, drive mounts (though they can be slow over the Internet), video chat, VoIP, even stuff like BGP or old protocols like IPX work.

UI issues for sure, but the product is great. I have computers in 3 different organizations and the ability to tie them into a coherent virtual site so they can all talk to each other is amazing. I no longer have to worry about having forgotten some file on my home network that I needed at the university, for instance. Looking forward to V2!

Really happy to hear it's all going well, and I've been excited about V2 since I read the blog post about it - your product is awesome and solves a genuine need, and I really want you to succeed.

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