Tailscale has reached general availability

Github's on the list to support, yeah. We can speak most "identity provider" protocols these days (OAuth, OIDC, SAML, etc.), but it's this weird little universe: the protocols are meant to let you implement once to support everyone, but in practice every IdP has its own little idiosyncrasies that mean you need a little bit of dedicated code for each new IdP. So, we end up with a backlog of "support IdP X, which is ostensibly OAuth but does something strange we've never seen yet" :)

Do you plan to release a Terraform provider for configuring Tailscale?

I want to add something for fair-minded users who may still be wondering, after all that, whether the interest in the OP really is organic or whether there might be shenanigans. It's natural to worry about this, especially because other users tend to make loud and grand claims about abuse, whether they have knowledge or not.

You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.

Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.

To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they are the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.

Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.

I disagree. It is challenging to monetize, but so are many other things.

I'll give what I think are my reasons:

- It's "easy" to do a proof of concept here, but it's brutally hard to make it really work well and at scale. There are a lot of buggy NATs, highly restrictive firewalls, etc. Network virtualization, which is what you need for it to be general purpose rather than app specific, is another layer of difficulty.

- It's hard to do it securely. Anything that gets popular will get attacked a lot and has to stand up against that. It's easier to secure centralized systems against most attacks for multiple reasons.

- The dominant paradigmatic fads from 2004-2019(ish) were cloud and mobile. Cloud obviates the need for this (in exchange for all privacy and freedom), while early mobile devices and mobile data options were too wimpy to do P2P. The latter is still a problem but less so today than 5-10 years ago.

- Most P2P software has had poor usability, slowing its adoption.

- The cryptocurrency bubble sucked all the air out of the decentralization room, causing the entire notion of P2P and decentralization to get conflated with CoInZ. That seems to be ending.

(Tailscale employee here) For personal use, we're planning a "sharing" feature, so that you can share machines (or individual services) with friends, and they just show up on their network (after mutual approval, of course). It's a feature I very much want for my personal use of tailscale, so it's going to happen :)