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It’s also entirely impossible to use by itself when both devices you’re trying to connect are behind a NAT or some other restricted network.

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That's true, but the $5 VPS should have a public IP, either v4 or v6. Other devices can route their traffic through it, and then every device can reach other devices, regardless of NAT.

But I'd think at that point there'd be arguments for using that vps to instead facilitate a p2p connection... right?

Yes, but only if the VPS becomes a bottleneck. Otherwise self-hosting Headscale does not seem worth it. My guess is that the threshold is at dozens of devices in simultaneous use.

It better have v4 if you ever want to use it while traveling. v6 is still not widely enough available on public Wi-Fi networks and even many mobile operators.

On some OSes you could probably also use some additional 4->6 tunnel, but that probably doesn't work stacked under Wireguard on iOS and Android.

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