I'll stick to my 100% self-hosted Wireguard setup, thank you very much.
I also run self-hosted Wireguard. Initially on a Debian box, nowadays it is integrated into my router (admittedly, this is closed source). For around 6 years at this point.
The whole thing could not be easier and simpler. It has never randomly broken on me. It is fast. It is free. There is no middle man, no vendor.
I never understood the popularity of Tailscale, though that is on me. I'm sure it is a great product, I just never tried it, do not seem the target audience.
What confuses me is the often accompanying, sometimes aggressive anti-selfhosting stance in these sorts of threads. I do not see this in other topics, e.g. someone mentioning they run Jellyfin isn't met with "why not Plex?". Where does that come from? We are on HackerNews, not ProductShillNews, aren't we? I guess self hosting Wireguard is too boring to warrant any further discussion? The VPN equivalent of a Toyota Corolla.
Where Tailscale comes into its own is automatic managing of mesh networking (like an “sdwan” solution). The other thing it excels at is firewall busting - if you have a firewall (with or without address translation) which only allows outgoing traffic to be established (with UDP timeouts for session) then Tailscale also works in a similar way to turn/stun.
If I needed that capability then I’d be looking at Headscale. I don’t need it though.
Remember that this is hackernews, not slashdot. Where the community used to be far smaller and the technology far smaller it was quite normal for everyone to understand basic building blocks of ip addresses, use open source software, wear t-shirts threatening to replace people with a small shell script etc.
It’s not the same community, many people here have no real understanding of computer fundamentals, but instead have expertise in specific narrow areas. They also have little interest in things like free software, but do have an interest in building a new billion dollar company to sell to a behemoth.
Some would consider that an anti-feature. Firewalls are not to be busted. Nothing good lies at the extreme end of working around overly strict policies. Change the policy instead.
i have my homelab only reachable via tailscale and can access everything i would ever want on the go that way. it was a matter of 15 min to get it all working.
> I guess self hosting Wireguard is too boring to warrant any further discussion?
It's popular because you don't have to deal with NAT punching. It "just works", all the time. And Wireguard is not too boring, it's just not enough on its own.
I'm all for self-hosting and this is exactly why I prefer to use Tailscale and not have to manage jump-hosts and STUN points on some cloud, given that I won't be able to make it as reliable as Tailscale and as cheap as Tailscale (effectively $0). So this is literally the only tradeoff I made while self-hosting everything else.
Can you talk an $elderly_relative through a wireguard installation on the phone so they can join your VPN?
I've done it with Tailscale and it's a breeze.
Others report no issues but I had massive drain on iOS even with only 4 connections open.
Native wireguard is unnoticeable.
I ditched wireguard for tailscale for the ease of managing it. I'd much rather run my own independently but CBA with the config editing hassle.
Does it do the opposite of that?