You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.
> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
Exactly, yeah. Small VPS providers are possible to get blocked but blocking AWS regions would be devastating. So it is the perfect place to put something like this.
I lived in China for a while and there were several waves of VPN blocks. Also very few VPN services even try to actively support VPN-blocking nations anymore. Any commercial offering will be blocked eventually.
What I settled on for decent reliability and speeds was a free-tier EC2 hosted in an international region. I then setup a SOCKS5 server and connected my devices to it. You mentioned Cloudflare so whatever their VM service is might also work.
It's very low profile as it's just your traffic and the state can't easily differentiate your host from the millions of others in that cloud region.
LPT for surviving the unfree internet: GitHub won't be blocked and you'll find all the resources and downloads you need for this method and others posted by Chinese engineers.
Edit: If you're worried about being too identifiable because of your static IP, well it's just a computer, you can use a VPN on there too if you want to!
It is a fun little site, I really enjoyed playing with it.
You really need to add some spam prevention, title & comment length limits, fix exploits, etc.
I wanted to play around with it some more, but it's just pure spam now.