Taildrop was kind of easy, actually

https://t.co/Tu0TxtdlTFTaildrop works for large files, it goes point to point rather than through the cloud, it’s secured using your existing identity provider, and best of all, it doesn’t need any bluetooth.I just shared a 3GB file from a Macbook to an iPhone using @Tailscale to test if it was able to handle big files well and it is!No more trying to discover Airdrop devices or dealing with broken Bluetooth to send media around!It is kinda handy:ohhhhh!!! This is so cool.Seriously though, Taildrop is a thing that lets you transfer files between your own devices, over your point-to-point Tailscale+WireGuard mesh network, across various different OS platforms. Still, FTP is a big inspiration for us:Along with telnet (the precursor to ssh), FTP was one of the first two application protocols used on the Internet.Transferring big files from one computer to another is one of the fundamental things we all want to do, and which, perversely, somehow is nowadays harder to do than it was with FTP decades ago.Taildrop is fewer lines of code than the ftp command, more secure than FTP, and easier to use than FTP, even though it was easier to invent than FTP.In short, to me, Taildrop is a sign that maybe, just maybe, the Internet is finally once again evolving in the right direction. And we wanted to make it easy for the next people, who won’t be us, to build the next app the easy way.Behind the scenes of that HTTP PUT request, there’s some machinery we needed to add:The new Tailscale “localapi” lets local apps query the local tailscale instance over HTTP. For example, it can get a list of peer devices that might be Taildrop targets, or which services are running on those peers.The new “whois”[2] service lets you find out the user identity of a secure TCP or UDP session established over the Tailscale network. We’ll have to do more work when we allow inter-user transfers later.)The new “peerapi” lets Tailscale nodes send messages to each other, over the encrypted Tailscale link. (As of this writing, the Android client for Taildrop isn’t done yet, but it’s coming soon.) iOS gave us some pain, since the Tailscale backend isn’t allowed to write to user-visible file storage such as the Files app. Instead, we have to deliver a notification, which when clicked, can open the frontend GUI, which can move the files into their final location.We’re not sure yet exactly where we’ll take the peerapi; maybe it’ll be useful mainly for features provided directly inside Tailscale, like Taildrop. We’ll see.It’s instructive to think about what you might have had to do if you were instead trying to transfer files between your devices without all that nice infrastructure.First of all, you’d have to decide whether to (a) beam everything to the cloud and back, or (b) establish a p2p link between two devices and send the files directly.Okay, that’s a trick question; almost nobody ever chooses option (b) anymore. So the uploader needs to encrypt the file with, uh, the downloader’s public key, and……oh no. Then the user picks one, it encrypts the file and uploads it, and the downloader we chose will have the right key to decrypt.Look.