alt Hacker NewsWhether or not you're being overly paranoid depends on your needs.
As I said on another comment, my use can be tracked by volume and timing, but since I'm only connecting to my house or my in-laws', and using an exit node on one of them, I'm not doing anything with it that I wouldn't do openly from my house. If I were hosting Anna's Archive, it would not do.
As noted by others, Headscale works if you want fully self-hosted. The features it doesn't have aren't important to the typical home user. The free tier of Tailscale is really, really easy to set up and a very non-technical user can just use it if someone with even modest skills, like me, sets it up. That's why I use it. I can talk my wife through how to use Tailscale over the phone. I can set up OpenVPN or Wireguard (I set up an OpenBSD firewall and NAT system in the mid-late 1990s for an office and used it with SSH tunnels and VNC to do some remote troubleshooting), but I can't troubleshoot it remotely with a nontechnical user.
You keep saying you don't mind timing and volume information known by Tailscale but much more concerningly compared to that is that they can add peers to your tailnet. In fact that's how their optional open-port scanner service discovery feature works. And even if you trust Tailscale, which I generally do, then there is the concern that they only support login through SSO via identity providers. You have to trust them as well.