Hacker News Reader

Comment by fariszr | Hacker News Reader

Great blog post, but unfortunately from my experience with my kinda tech-friendly family, i can tell you that not exposing service publicly is an absolute UX killer.

Nobody uses the local nextcloud because they just don't think they can rely on it, it doesn't always work from their perspective, and is too finicky to use, because it needs an external app (Tailscale).

This can be only fixed when the app itself can trigger a vpn connection, and I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.

View on HN

Let me introduce you and many other people in this thread looking for a "let my app live in my VPN but still expose it family/friends without the need to install tailscale clients" solution to Tailscale Funnel: https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel

An easy solve for this is to buy public domains for the sites you want to use, run a static website on them that says “turn on tailscale to access this site, set that up here (link to download a client preconfigured for my tailnet, invite only of course)”, then use tailscale DNS overrides to set up CNAMEs for that public DNS’s (sub)domains which point to the tailnet internal service domains.

That would only if they used the website not the phone app, which isn't really the case.

This would work if they didn't use the apps, which in the case of nextcloud they do.

I do have to sit down and walk folks through setting up Tailscale, Nextcloud, etc on their devices. So far though, I haven't had any complaints once that is done. Nextcloud just syncs in the background and they can navigate to sites like normal. But my family is probably more tech literate than most, so that helps

Yeah but that means they have to be aware of the need to activate tailscale on their phones manually everytime they want to use your apps.

On PC I agree, you can just leave it running, on mobile though it chews through the battery like it's nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com