I think that technology like Tailscale has sold me on the concept of on-internet intranets, as in subnets with extreme firewall policies that doesn’t prevent you from accessing the broader net when necessary but gives network maintainers strict control on how their networks are bridged. I’ve been thinking about this to the degree that I’ve been trying to do more research into how this can be achieved with open source technologies like Headscale.

Ideally, you’d want to have a peer-to-peer relay server option for bridging multiple “trusted” networks which would then provide a broad DNS resolution to let you access services that are advertised for bridged networks. So it would be like if, via tailscale, I could connect to another person’s tailnet using specific domain names if those services were exposed via a “bridge node”, so to speak.

Tailscale themselves have no reason to implement this though; As a business, they would actually prefer you buy larger client counts. I don’t blame them for this, it’s the basis of their business. But I think, long term, multiple intranets will be really important for digital sovereignty for both smaller nation states and individuals. We can no longer trust the broad web as it was. The fediverse is the first step, the next is tighter meta-networks in tandem with federated internet services.