[aborsy]

This is something that everyone says and nobody does.

Do your friends do that?

The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

[yoavm]

My siblings and I live in 3 different continents. We use Tailscale exactly for that. It's also installed on some of the VPS I own, so all-in-all we have around 7 exit nodes in different countries to choose from. It was really a breeze to set up.

The best part is that our IPs never seemed to be blocked by any service provider.

[spwa4]

Isn't ssh -D + configuring a socks proxy in your browser a lot easier and faster? (using one of the many proxy switcher extensions) It would only work for the browser (although you do have socksify), but much quicker to set up and only ssh needs to work. No software install whatsoever. I mean, at least for VPSes, of course this won't work without an IP to connect to, or an IP behind NAT.

But: no software install.

[fragmede]

Where do you SSH to? You need to install sshd on that system somewhere, somehow? Your preferred software seems easier to install, and it is, for you. Others don't have the same experience though.

How do you configure apps on your phone to use a socks proxy?

We could rathole on what constitutes "a lot" easier, but that doesn't seem interesting so I'll just point out that there's a Tailscale app for Apple TV.

[yoavm]

With Tailscale, my clients and my exit nodes can easily include Windows machines, Apple laptops, Android phones etc. And I can explain to my siblings how to set it up in 5 minutes, without them ever needing to hear about a terminal.

[dns_snek]

Consider the case where a non-technical person wants to watch US streaming services from their smartphone. No software install, but 5% of the features and 1% of the usability.

[fragmede]

The thing that Tailscale also allows you to do is access systems on the tailnet, without exposing those servers to the Internet. For the self-hoster with friends, this is really really useful.

Do I think this is a thing that more people than you think are doing? Given that you're questioning if it happens at all, I'd say yes.

Do I think this is at all common or normal? Absolutely not. My friends and their friends are very technical compared to the general population, so it's not surprising that something "weird" like this would be overrepresented, but even then it's not commonplace to share with friends. You really need some tight-knit bonds in order for it to work. Bonds that many people don't have a ton of.

I should mention though, it's not just "bad" websites. A lot of websites geolocate, and for foreign nationals, those websites don't make content available outside the country (for whatever reason). So for a taste of streaming TV from home, a residential proxy in the home country does the trick to let them watch "local" news of home.

[kro]

Some people also do run Tor exit nodes on their ISP connections, of course receiving tons of abuse complaints, but apparently it's legal enough.

[inemesitaffia]

So people may be willing to do it for strangers in exchange for paying the bills.