whats tailscale

i read the website but i got confused any summaries here

Obligatory just search it bro.

But anyway, I guess everywhere starts somewhere. So I'll try my best to give you a summary. I'll try to make it super simple. Sorry if it comes off as condescending, that's not my intention. Also, I'm not an expert by any means when it comes to networking. So please correct me if I make a mistake.

You first need to know what VPNs are. If you're thinking about stuff like ProtonVPN, then yes they are VPN, but we mean it in a broader sense. VPNs are simply tunnels in a network that make it looks like the traffic is coming from somewhere where it's not actually coming from. Imagine you're a kid, and your parents had an argument. Now you're stuck repeating one parent's words to another. That's a VPN. Your government doesn't want you to be able to interact with some site, VPNs can basically send you that data through somewhere else, which your government isn't blocking. That's the use for the commercial VPNs.

But the other use, which is more relevant to this discussion, is simply being able to connect to a remote machine. Let's say you want to access your home PC when traveling. You're definitely not on the same network, but VPNs can create a tunnel which will let you act like you're in the same network. It'll essentially repeat/proxy whatever data/command you want to the remote machine, and vice versa.

The industry standard for VPNs is wireguard. It's meant to be ultra lightweight, super fast, and super secure. It's now part of the Linux kernel, so basically available on most machines by default. While it's not hard to setup, it's not easy either. You need to manage your credentials, make sure that there are ports open so that the machines can reach each other, etc. It can get pretty compliant pretty quickly if you're stuck behind a CGNAT.

Tailscale attempts to simplify that process. It uses wireguard-go (a userspace implementation of wireguard written in Go) under the hood to make these connections, but it takes care of the problems mentioned above automatically. So you have an account with them (the free tier is probably fine, or you can self-host using headscale), and you can simply start connecting devices and each device can talk to the other one as if they're on the same network. Tailscale essentially creates wireguard tunnels between each pair of devices, and manages all the networking quirks.

It's by no means unique. There are services like Nebula, Netmaker etc. that attempt to do the same. Tailscale is just a good implementation of this idea. It also has apps for nearly every device you may want to use. Hope that cleared things up for you.

nah its ok to be condessending thats what i get for being lazy lol thanks for the in depth explanation