71–80 of 315 posts
> That’s an IBM analogy.
Wow, this dialogue comes in the first episode of halt and catch fire. I didn't know this was a real thing
Here's the clip at 1.51 minutes, if anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
I like Tailscale, but this reads as too self-aggrandizing. You have a mesh VPN product with some value-added services on top of it. That's great, but this idea isn't novel or unique. Why should your solution be the "new internet" instead of any of the alternatives? I wouldn't want to rely on a single company for all my internet infrastructure, anyway. So I'll stick with the traditional internet with all its complexit…
> Its major problems aren't technical but social, and no new technology will solve those. Really? Isn't the major problem of the current internet is inherent centralization of services because the initial promise of 100% decentralized network is simply too complex to realistically manage? I view that problem as deeply technical. Unless if by "social" you simply mean everyone should become an experienced sysadmin. (or…
Not quite. The internet _is_ decentralized. What made the web so centralized from the start could partially be the result of lacking tools that made publishing as easy as consuming content. I.e. had we had a publishing equivalent to the web browser, perhaps the web landscape would've been different today. You can see that this was planned as phase 2 of the original WWW proposal[2] ("universal authorship"), but it never came to pass AFAIK.
So you could say that the problem is partly technical. But it's uncertain how much this would've changed how people use the web, and if companies would've still stepped in to fill the authorship void, as many did and still do today. Once the web started gaining global traction in the early 90s, that ship had sailed. People learned that they had to use GeoCities to publish content, and later MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. These services gained popularity because they were popular.
There have been many attempts over the years to decentralize the web, but now the problem is largely social. As you say, we've had the fediverse for over a decade now. How is that going? Are technical issues still a hurdle to achieve mass adoption, or are people not joining because of other reasons? I'd say it's the latter.
Most people simply don't care about decentralization. They don't care about privacy, or that some corporation is getting rich off their data. They do care about using a service with interesting content where most of their contacts are. So it's a social and traction issue, much more than a technical one. The only people who use decentralized services today are those who care more about the technology than following the herd. Until you can either get the average web user interested in the technology, or achieve sufficient traction so that people don't care about the technology, decentralized services will remain a niche.
There is another technical aspect to this, though. Even if we could get everyone to use decentralized services today, the internet infrastructure is not ready for it. Most ISPs still offer asymmetrical connections, and residential networks simply aren't built for serving data. Many things will need to change on the operational side before your decentralized dream can become reality. I think this landscape would've also been different had the web started with decentralized principles, but alas, here we are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention. On a given tailnet, users can only reach their own machines. Each machine that joins the network has an “owner” shown under the machine name in the admin portal. By default users can only reach their own machines, not everyone’s else’s. As the network admin you can manage that through the ACLs tab.
And this is why tailscale isn't solving the fundamental issues of connectivity. Thanks and cheers eddythompson80.
An incredibly long ramp up to complaining about centralised control by rent seekers (a very reasonable complaint!) which gets bogged down in some ostensibly unrelated shade about whether client-server computing makes sense (it does) or is itself somehow responsible for the rent seeking (it isn't; you can seek rent on proprietary peer to peer systems as well!) to then arrive at: > There’s going to be a new world of ha…
"...you can rent seek on proprietary peer to peer systems as well..." I still use a non-proprietary one that predates Tailscale and that is not OpenVPN. It is small and simple enough even I, a non-programmer, can make modifications. It's possible one ends up using client-server in order to achieve peer-to-peer because not everyone has an internet-reachable, non-firewalled IP address. Using some hosting company's serv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is why tailscale isn't solving the fundamental issues of connectivity. Thanks and cheers eddythompson80.
What is the alternative, here? Letting all machines on a tailnet talk sounds like a security issue. Maybe a better onboarding flow that prompts you to set ACLs when inviting a new user?
I am, among other things, a network engineer, and previously I shared my tailnet with my brother's windows machine by logging him into my account directly, and it worked flawlessly.
I want TS to win, but they've got product and engineering work to do if they're serious.
An incredibly long ramp up to complaining about centralised control by rent seekers (a very reasonable complaint!) which gets bogged down in some ostensibly unrelated shade about whether client-server computing makes sense (it does) or is itself somehow responsible for the rent seeking (it isn't; you can seek rent on proprietary peer to peer systems as well!) to then arrive at: > There’s going to be a new world of ha…
Lol. The tailscale CEO is preaching “tomorrow you’ll have or not have Tailscale. And if you don’t, you won’t be able to run apps that only work in a post-Tailscale world.”?? That won’t go down well in 10 years if they don’t become Microsoft-scale juggernauts.
If not, why bother? TLS and http don't charge licensing fees...
It's been really disheartening to watch the steady enshittification of Tailscale, Inc. I knew it was coming with 100% certainty once they raised 100mil in 2022. It's still heartbreaking because the product itself is quite good.
The worst part is because Tailscale, Inc got there "first" (I know nebula existed before Tailscale did. shut up, okay?) and now the other competitors like NetMaker, NetBird, are all following almost the exact same business model ("open core+" - open source client and some kind of claim to an open source control plane with infinity caveats to funnel enterprise dollarydoos back to the vulture capitalists)
I'm distracted by all the references to being "old" because the author remembers the 1990s.
I wouldn’t be too surprised if the median age of Tailscale’s audience was 24.
As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network , I've had a feeling more and more that we're on the cusp of something transformative... For those who want it and those who care. There's an ecosystem of mostly FOSS software now designed to run on a home network and replace big, centralized, cloud providers. That software is right on the edge of being easy enough for…
> As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network Funnily enough, I was once like this but now I have deliberately moved everything to the big cloud providers as I don’t want to deal with the toil of running my own homelab anymore. This is coming from someone who used to have a FreeBSD server with ZFS disks and using jails to run various things like pf, samba, etc.…
The only time I do anything with this stuff is when I want to upgrade (which is very rare) or add something. My NAS solution is a custom mini-ITX I built 8 years ago which I feel has more than paid for itself. I have long stopped chasing the latest and greatest because most of what has been produced in the last decade is very usable.
Very wary of going cloud, as I can't as easily control costs.