Tangential ... I think I read somewhere that I cannot become a customer of tailscale without FAANG credentials ?

As in, I cannot simply sign up with my own personal identifiers (email, phone, etc.) but need to participate in a google auth or FB auth mechanism ?

I found it hard to believe - is this, indeed, the case ?

It's possible to use Tailscale with just a passkey [0], but it's a weird process because they don't let you create a tailnet and a passkey account at the same time. Instead, you need to create an account with a throwaway FAANG credential and send yourself an invite to that account's tailnet, and then use that invite to create a passkey-linked Tailscale account. This account can then create its own tailnet, at which point the original tailnet (and the throwaway FAANG account) can be discarded.

It's a weird process and not particularly user friendly (passkey accounts are tied to a specific passkey and can't have additional ones added, so you need to create a new account if you, say, migrate from one hardware key to another). Hopefully they improve the process before passkey support goes out of beta.

[0] https://tailscale.com/kb/1269/passkeys

Since April 2023 they support custom OIDC providers[1], and as of April 2024 that was extended to the free plan as well[2], so you can bring your own auth.

[1]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1240/sso-custom-oidc

[2]: https://tailscale.com/blog/sso-tax-cut

You need one of the following:

Google, Microsoft, Github, Apple or your own OIDC Provider.

They do not have their own account backend.

So you dont technically need a FAANG account if you have a Gitea, Gitlab, Authentik Account or something like that.

You can also use Codeberg.