Tailscale is a private treehouse. Everyone gets an official member badge, has their name on the roster, and can walk in anytime to hang out, share toys, and see everone else in the club.

Tailcat is two tin cans tied together with a string. There is no club, no badges, and no rules. You give one can to someone, whisper a secret through the string, and as soon as you hang up, it’s gone.

Easy VPN is how I see it. Like zero config, very smooth and pretty slick

With normal Tailscale they host the management end of things, you host the servers, their system negotiates directly connecting them together.

I think this lets you host that management connection yourself. But I'm kinda confused just wtf is going on.

Scales are rough... Cats are fluffy and smooth :D !

Never mind me, wait for a better ELI :D

This GIF reminds me that I kept saying "who loves orange soda? Kel loves orange soda!" Do my significant other.

And this can presumably hopefully finally fucking condemn hamachi to the grave, maybe?

Forward local ports to a tailcat server

To make ports served by a tailcat server available as ordinary local TCP ports (for browsers, database clients, or other tools that do not support SOCKS or stdio), run forward with the server's tailcat address:

$ tailcat serve 8080,3306
# 🐈 Server listening with new address: tcXXXXXXXXX

$ tailcat forward tcXXXXXXXXX 18080:8080 3306

A local port of 0 asks the operating system for a free port; each listener prints its address once it's listening.

To forward local ports to assets on the network reachable by an exit-node server, run the server in exit-node mode and specify each remote IP address and port in the mapping:

$ tailcat serve exit-node
# 🐈 Server listening with new address: tcXXXXXXXXX

$ tailcat forward tcXXXXXXXXX \
    3001:172.23.52.30:3001 \
    17170:172.23.52.31:17170

This forwards 127.0.0.1:3001 to 172.23.52.30:3001 and 127.0.0.1:17170 to 172.23.52.31:17170 through the exit-node server.

By default, listeners bind to 127.0.0.1 and diagnostic logs are suppressed. Pass --verbose before the subcommand to enable verbose networking logs. Use --bind=0.0.0.0 only when clients on other machines should be able to connect:

$ tailcat forward --bind=0.0.0.0 tcXXXXXXXXX 18080:8080

Press Ctrl-C to stop forwarding.

It sounds more like netcat maybe? Less server client architecture more peer to peer?