- edit: Is it because it's not possible to have a good Minecraft gaming experience without it? I am really curious to understand why would people need that extra layer zero config vpn?
As for whether you need it for a Minecraft server.. well I wouldn't personally have questioned it, we're on a site called hacker news after all. If anything I'd love more posts like this from people who are tinkering with things.
If you remove the DigitalOcean part though and add in a home PC you do then get the benefits of being able to just connect. No port forwards, no faff.
If we're really really unironically asking why.. because Tailscale wants more customers, it's what companies do.
It gets easier?!
I love how easy Wireguard is, stock, so perhaps I'll try Tailscale.
Also, a good reason to do this would be to play with friends easily, sometimes NAT and other things make it hard to connect to a gaming server, and also servers like Minecraft run a lot of code from inexperienced devs, so probably lots of security concerns there. Setting up a firewall to do that is a bit harder, you need to know your friends IPs and such.
Also the firewall won't provide the same security, here afaik it also handle auth for you (only approved clients can connect), so you don't have to worry about how secure the auth is on the server you're exposing.
(for most people doing all those things securily would likely take much longer than 10min, and unless they're very technically savy I'm not sure how much secure it would be)
Anyone else have other reasons in minds why it's useful?
God I wish ipv6 had taken off. P2P has taken a huge hit because of NAT.