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Comment by tomasff | Hacker News Reader

If you already use Tailscale, Taildrop [1] works great.

[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop

I wanted to use this, but reading the documentation, my understanding was that with tailscale data goes through a server.

Am I understanding it correctly?

EDIT

> This makes it a great solution for sending sensitive or large files without third-party servers in the middle.

It clearly says the opposite. I don't know where I got that idea from.

It sends the data using wireguard, so it’s p2p.

There is a coordination server that sets up the initial connection, but after that both devices are connected directly to each other.

At the very worse case (NAT hell or something else) they may use a DERP relay. But if you have a cooperative connection or plain local connection it works fine.

There's encryption overhead though, I can't saturate a 1Gbps over Tailscale on M1, while direct connection works (iperf3).

Tailscale looks nice. I acknowledge there is a lot of room for NAT traversal and alike tools. I am quite curious how do you manage network settings across your network. This could have served me well 10 yrs ago.

From that doc:

> Taildrop is currently limited to sending files between your own personal devices. You cannot send files to devices owned by other users even on the same Tailscale network.

Good point, it doesn't quite fit the same purpose as AirDrop & other alternatives. Useful if you want to share files between your devices though!

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