Comment by krick
18 hours ago
Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?
Tailscale has made all of their client source code available for anyone to view so if you want to confirm that you’re not sending unencrypted data or keys through their servers you’re more than free to do so.
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale
I think there is some merit to setting up wireguard (e.g. you want more devices than what Tailscale offers for free, or their servers become unreliable for some reason)
But people who push the “scarey boogeyman will look at your data” with Tailscale are either technically illiterate or overly-paranoid.
I don't think the hesitation comes from the boogeyman you speak of, but just relying on someone else other than yourself.
This has further implications than just security. Also, whoever gets into self hosting already wants to not rely on others for the most part. If you didn't go into this for the tinkering aspect, I guess Tailscale is completely ok for most, perhaps even ideal.
Nevertheless, none of this has anything to do with the achievements or not of Tailscale. People saying that your own VPN is ok have a point.
If you got yourself into self hosting, you might as well go fully independent. You have already taken care of the most complicated part anyways.