What if we build things that don't scale.
What if we don't focus on reaching the demand of millions of users, but just the wants of a few.
Building small, but highly tailored services.
I'm not going to claim that Tailscale directly enables that, but it potentially might...
I've been using Tailscale for a while now and it advertises itself as
Tailscale makes creating software-defined networks easy: securely connecting users, services, and devices.
So we get easy to use mesh networking with minimal setup - this means trusted clients can connect directly to your service without it being publicly available on the internet. We can build services that aren't publicly exposed, and thus have a smaller threat area than a publicly available service. This makes it possible to build small secure communities online, that fill niches. Sharing some photos with your family over a VPN is a different ballgame to sharing photos with your family over publicly exposed endpoints
As a proponent of small web, this seems fairly huge. We're able to build up communities based on invites and trust. A huge problem with running any public facing infrastructure is the public bit:
It feels odd to say a VPN provides a good stepping stone towards mitigating this issue, but it does.
You can build a community, hidden from public attack, carefully built up with deliberation, you control the access.
And you get to make different architectural decisions. To build a services for a
small user base, sqlite will probably cut it for a while. No need for complex
infrastructure when you're not trying to scale to millions.
The smallweb approach lets us focus on building something meaningful for a specific group rather than chasing growth metrics.