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Comment by 0x6c6f6c | Hacker News Reader

I'm not following what you're saying here at all.

Meshnet is their peer-to-peer secure networking solution, not their conventional VPN solution. It allowed you to have multiple devices in your account directly communicate with one another, set a device as gateways for routing network traffic of devices connected to Meshnet (basically making your own VPN server), sending files directly between devices, and likely more I'm not aware of.

It was essentially their Tailscale / ZeroTier offering, but in the opposite manner to Tailscale which added Mullvad integration to provide a more conventional VPN atop their mesh network.

They are removing Meshnet, and the primary capabilities of NordVPN will be their global set of traditional VPN servers. Some of the features like P2P file transmission can be replaced by e.g. NordLocker albeit without P2P if I understand it correctly. But mesh networking is gone in December.

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Historically, VPN (Virtual Private Network) was a LAN like network overlaid on the internet devices could communicate with each other as if they were connected to the same network.

One of the possible configurations you could have in such a setup is one or more gateways to the internet. Much like the gateway on a traditional LAN, traffic bound for the internet would first go to the gateway.

In modern times, when people say VPN they're typically referring to a VPN with only a gateway and nothing else that all traffic gets routed through. NordVPNs Meshnet would be more similar to what a traditional VPN actually is, a means for separate devices to communicate as if they were local.

As NordVPN correctly points out, this is not new, not what most people using their VPN service are looking for, and for those that are, they're better served elsewhere.

> In modern times, when people say VPN they're typically referring to a VPN with only a gateway and nothing else that all traffic gets routed through.

That's not really true -- this narrower usage only seems to apply in the consumer-oriented VPN-as-a-service space. Every other context maintains the conventional terminology. Routers have VPN options, WireGuard and OpenVPN are advertised as VPN applications, businesses set up corporate VPNs to access on-premises resources, etc. All of these are referring to the standard meaning of VPN.

> Meshnet is their peer-to-peer secure networking solution, not their conventional VPN solution.

What you're describing as a "peer-to-peer secure networking solution" -- i.e. tunneling through the public internet securely to join your device to a LAN -- is what "VPN" actually refers to.

The "conventional VPN" solution you're referring to is just a secure forwarding proxy, which is only a subset of VPN functionality.

> It was essentially their Tailscale / ZeroTier offering, but in the opposite manner to Tailscale which added Mullvad integration to provide a more conventional VPN

What Tailscale and Zerotier offer is close to full VPN functionality, whereas Mullvad offers the same limited traffic forwarding service as Nord and also conflates that with VPN generally. A better way of describing this is that Mullvad adds a secure tunneling layer to the conventional VPN managed by TailScale.

> atop their mesh network.

There are no mesh networks involved in any of this. Mesh networking is a technique where low-level network topology is established via ad hoc handshaking between individual nodes, without central routers. None of these services are even operating at that layer.

As I said, all of the terminology in this space is muddled up pretty severely.

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