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The New Internet

tailscale.com

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Re: The New Internet

#31

Post by metadat »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #29
metadat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but even ICMP pings? He also couldn't ping my systems, it seemed really broken.

Ping uses ICMP. Windows blocks ICMP by default, so yes `ping ` doesn't work by default. Is your system your father was trying to ping a Windows system as well? The other thing to check is if he was running another VPN on his machine at the same time. Running multiple VPNs at the same time (both Windows and Linux) requires extra fiddling to map the routing correctly to prevent their rules from overlapping/breaking eac…

No other VPN, but my windows machine firewall is on and it pings fine.

Anyway, tailscale still has more to go. Inviting someone to your tailnet doesn't seem to be the same as adding a machine yourself.

Re: The New Internet

#32

Post by wmf »

0x0000000 wrote: post #7

The new internet, an overlay network on top of the existing internet. Cool?

It seems less bad than the competing vision of tunneling absolutely everything over HTTPS.

Re: The New Internet

#33

Post by Aeolun »

I really liked the premise of the post until I got to the last paragraph and had to do a quick double take.

Sure Tailscale makes the internet easier again, but I still have to rely on a landlord. Something I didn’t/don’t have to for the internet. As much as a lot of stuff has been centralized, even today I can connect to any server in the world with just the link.

Re: The New Internet

#34

Post by oneplane »

wmf wrote: post #32
0x0000000 wrote: post #7

The new internet, an overlay network on top of the existing internet. Cool?

It seems less bad than the competing vision of tunneling absolutely everything over HTTPS.

At least it's not a network that revolves around middle-out compression.

Re: The New Internet

#35

Post by bomewish »

metadat wrote: post #6

I really enjoy and appreciate the tailscale service, but this article didn't click for me. I love an inspiring CEO rally speech as much as the next early adopter, and agree that there is a ridiculous amount of developer friction and complexity in computing, but tailscale still has its own friction and isn't on track to solve the big picture issues _at all_. As a concrete example, a few weeks ago, I invited my dad to…

ACL issue?

Re: The New Internet

#36

Post by ssl-3 »

OJFord wrote: post #19
jgalt212 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to move off of tailscale, what would you move to?

Zerotier is I think the obvious answer? I haven't used it though; it's more proprietary, not less.

AFAIK, Zerotier is about equally proprietary, more-free (as in beer), and has been doing the node-to-node mesh thing instead of spoke-and-hub longer than Tailscale has been in existence.

And if I remember correctly, ZT was initially created to provide something like this "New Internet" concept that Tailscale has apparently recently discovered, except they called it "Earth" and abandoned it in 2023.

(Some things don't change, I guess.)

Re: The New Internet

#37

Post by eddythompson80 »

imiric wrote: post #8

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 the slight variation of, everyone should know an experienced sysadmin who's willing to run their application for them for free)

Take something as mainstream as social media. Imagine a world where Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/YouTube/Reddit/HN/etc worked (seamlessly) like bittorrent. An application on your machine when you run it, it joins a "Facebook" network where your friends see you online through their instance of the application. Your feed/wall/etc is served to them directly from your machine. All your communication with them is handled directly between the 2 (or 1000 or millions) of you. No centralized server needed. You can easily extend and apply this majority of centralized application today. The only ones I can think of where this wouldn't work would be inherently centralized services like banking for example.

There are already plenty of p2p networks that show that this is a viable solution. Bittorrent, soulseek, bitcoin, etc.

All the problems you will run into however to make this as seamless as just connecting to facebook.com are purely technical. The initial big hurdle is seamless p2p connectivity. That is without port forwarding, dynamic dns, and requiring advanced networking, security, and other sysadmin knowledge from every user. Next would be problems like what happens when the node is offline? What happens to latency and load if you need to connect to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of machines just to pull a "feed"? How is caching handled? How are updates/notifications pushed? How do nodes communicate when they are wildly out of date? Where is your data stored? How do you handle discoverability, security, etc.

All deeply technical problems. Most are solvable, but you're gonna have to invest a significant amount of effort to solve them one by one to reach the same brain-dead simple experience as a centralized service. The fediverse has been trying to solve just a small subset of these problems for over a decade now, and the solutions still require a highly capable sysadmin to give users a similar (or only slightly worse) experience than twitter.com.

Re: The New Internet

#38

Post by Spivak »

sneilan1 wrote: post #12
sweca wrote: post #10

Even though I don't agree with the whole "New Internet" thing, this article is very well written.

I agree. This is article reads well. It has flow, good punctuation and pacing. Apart from the message that we will eventually pay Tithe to our new overlord tailscale, it was great.

I mean it was given as an internal presentation about the business strategy, it's the kind of thing I would expect.

1. We took a hard-problem, peer-to-peer networking and IdM, and (mostly) solved it.

2. We're hoping this will drive people to build apps that leverage the unique capabilities of authenticated p2p mesh networks. It doesn't even have to be specifically for Tailscale.

3. People will want to use those apps and (if we're good at our jobs) choose to pay us to run the network for them over our competitors or building something in-house.

4. $$$

I'm not sure I would say this is as nefarious as the tone of the comments here suggest. Wanting a "killer app" for your software platform is pretty normal which is really what he's talking about. I would be nervous declaring victory or an inevitability without being to name what that killer app actually is but trying to figure it out/build it is a good strategy. It's one of those times where the desire for engineers to solve their pet-problems, play with shiny new toys, and build Halo LAN Party over Tailscale is aligned with the business.

Re: The New Internet

#39

Post by paulnpace »

Aeolun wrote: post #33

I really liked the premise of the post until I got to the last paragraph and had to do a quick double take. Sure Tailscale makes the internet easier again, but I still have to rely on a landlord. Something I didn’t/don’t have to for the internet. As much as a lot of stuff has been centralized, even today I can connect to any server in the world with just the link.

> I really liked the premise of the post until I got to the last paragraph and had to do a quick double take.

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

Re: The New Internet

#40

Post by eddythompson80 »

metadat wrote: post #31
eddythompson80 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ping uses ICMP. Windows blocks ICMP by default, so yes `ping ` doesn't work by default. Is your system your father was trying to ping a Windows system as well? The other thing to check is if he was running another VPN on his machine at the same time. Running multiple VPNs at the same time (both Windows and Linux) requires extra fiddling to map the routing correctly to prevent their rules from overlapping/breaking eac…

No other VPN, but my windows machine firewall is on and it pings fine. Anyway, tailscale still has more to go. Inviting someone to your tailnet doesn't seem to be the same as adding a machine yourself.

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.
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