this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Tailscale is as simplified as it gets and it doesn't require any knowledge, configuration or maintenance. The fact that you can use it for free makes me wary, but you can't deny how simple it is to use. Just log in with your account in all of the devices you want to access jellyfin on and voila. It's as if they were in the same lan.
I think their idea behind it is to convince relatively tech savvy people how great it works (it does) so they talk about it in their relatively tech savvy professional role at small and medium companies.
And at some point they will either start charging money for the small time user, or it will turn to shit, or both. You just know it will happen, the question is when not if. It isn't free, it's corporate.
I mean, most people dont really understand what a reverse proxy is doing, and with dynamic IP addresses and other complications that residential customers often can't control, it can be a challenge to configure properly. Not to mention if you want to use Jellyfin on a device that travels between home and outside you need to either modify the domain or IP Address each time you enter or leave the home Otherwise you just end up routimg all the traffic over the internet and back losing the advantage of LAN speeds and sucking down your ISP traffic quotas. Or you need to configure something much more robust like a local DNS server to properly route traffic to the LAN IP address instead of your WAN IP address. That might not be an issue if you're lucky enough to have an IPv6 block of addresses from your ISP and assign one to your server, but at least in the US most ISPs still use IPv4 with workarounds like 6rd for a single dynamic external IPv6 address with all of the same issues of the dynamic IPv4 addresses. Anyway, for most users hosting a Plex server is simple (unless they have double NAT kinds of issues) compared to setting up everything correctly to TailScale.
Uhm, no? I just use the lan IP for my jellyfin server at all times. The only difference between being phisically in the same place and outside is that I enable tailscale when I'm outside. I'm telling you, this is far simpler than you're making it out to be.
Honestly it is kind of wild that they have a cap on how many devices you can use at all. They store so little it’s wild. The thing that makes it really worth being a service is the relay network they handle and the fact that you can support the team building awesome features into the client. That being said headscale is a thing and if you wanna demystify it then you should take a look at that project. The tailscale docs have tons of info about how they operate under the hood too.
I skipped tailscale, so feel free to ignore me, but Netbird has been excellent and has no limitations I'm aware of.
My problem in the first place is that due to my ISP 's limitations, I can't run wireguard. If I could run it, I would do that instead of using headscale.