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Tailscale is slloowwww and I'm not a big fan of someone else controlling my network. Yeah, tailnet lock at all that, I know, but still...

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Tailscale in most cases establishes direct links between the nodes so it can't be any slower than the speed of the network you're already using.

And when it doesn't (which is often the case behind NAT), you're at the mercy of their relays which are not particularly fast.

As someone who previously led development of a commercial VPN system, I assure you, there are about 100 ways for a VPN to go slower than the network hosting it. Unfortunately.

Two cases I can think of are MTU misconfigurations and constrained CPU on either endpoint, where the node CPU can handle non-VPN network demands but can't handle the VPN demand.

You can use headscale [1] (open source) as the mothership, and all the published clients (AFAIK) support pointing them to an alternative mothership.

I set it up, and it worked, but regular Tailscale works so well out-of-the-box that I just used that instead of maintaining headscale.

[1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

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