I've met a lot of people who think Tailscale invented what it does.

Prior to Tailscale there were companies -- ZeroTier and before it Hamachi -- and as you say many FOSS projects and academic efforts. Overlay networks aren't new. VPNs aren't new. Automated P2P with relay fallback isn't new. Cryptographic addressing isn't new. They just put a good UX in front of it, somewhat easier to onboard than their competitors, and as you say had a really big marketing budget due to raising a lot when money was cheap.

Very few things are totally new. In the past ten years LLMs are the only actually new thing I've seen.

Shill disclosure: I'm the founder of ZeroTier, and we've pivoted a bit more into the industrial space, but we still exist as a free thing you can use to build overlays. Still growing too. Don't have any ill will toward Tailscale. As I said nobody "owns" P2P and they're doing something a bit different from us in terms of UX and target market.

These "dumb pipe" tools -- CLI tooling for P2P pipes -- are cool and useful and IMHO aren't exactly the same thing as ZT or TS etc. They're for a different set of use cases.

The worst thing about the Internet is that it evolved into a client-server architecture. I remain very cautiously optimistic that we might fix this eventually, or at least enable the other paradigm to a much greater extent.

I know it wasn't a "new" idea, but still, ZT was a paradigm shift for me. I was suddenly on the same LAN with people I cared about. Thank you for making it happen.

> put a good UX in front of it

It's good as long as everything works out of the box, but it's a nightmare when something doesn't work. Or at least that has been my experience. I'm used to always troubleshoot first when I have any issue, but with Tailscale I decided I'm done trying to fight it, next time something doesn't work I'll just open a ticket and make it the ops team problem.

I remember running Hamachi and NoIP DUC's (Dynamic Update Client) as a kid in late 2000's to expose private server addresses for games or for multiplayer through direct network addresses

NoIP was also the recommended "easy" option for configuring RAT (Trojan) host addresses at the time IIRC.

Hamachi was BIG in the gaming scene. I used to host a Tibia server and use it to make the server accessible to friends.

As one of the iroh developers I must say thank you for creating ZeroTier! It absolutely was part of the inspiration and it's seamless functioning continues to amaze me daily. Something that continues to drive me to strive for as seamless an experience in iroh.

I love the fact we can make different tools learning from each other and approaching making p2p usable in different ways.

As others have said Hamachi was very popular in some gaming communities. I don't know quite how it fits technologically, but a similar user experience seems to come from playit.gg[1].

[1] https://playit.gg/

As much as hyped tailscale is, at least there is an option to fully self-host coordination server. Do you have something like that?