> I keep hearing how great are Zerotier and Tailscale are, but from internet networking point of view it seems that are they not just encrypted overlay/underlay

> I keep hearing how great are Zerotier and Tailscale are, but from internet networking point of view it seems that are they not just encrypted overlay/underlay networks? I think the local-first dream (which I also share) is a bit different than the promise of these overlay networks. The overlay networks are a relatively small amount of infrastructure over current net technologies that allow folks to have private networks. I wouldn't underestimate the amount of value that brings to people. For example, it's much simpler to host web services and have them bind to an overlay network interface, and then just get privately accessible web services for free. The work needed to make applications work over a true zero-trust local-first network would be much greater. Thanks for the tip about Osterhout's HOMA work. That's really interesting stuff. I've been playing around with NNCP [1] recently which is a store-and-forward zero-trust network that also works local-first, but there's a lot more work to go to make it usable beyond just hackers. [1]: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html