Tailscale is just fancy software that creates peer to peer encrypted tunnels between your devices using wireguard.
You can think of it as a LAN for all your devices regardless of what network they’re physically connected to.
The default use case of Tailscale is to have a private LAN, just for you, not your friends. This is changing now, though.
Tailscale does as of recently have the ability to do what you’re saying for Minecraft. It’s called Tailscale Funnel. This lets you expose a port on any of your devices to the public internet with a TLS enabled host name.
Another option for your Minecraft server is to use Cloudflare Tunnel. Works great for this kind of thing and is pretty much functionally equivalent to Tailscale Funnel.
I recommend against using Funnel for this use case (because it exposes your server to everyone in the world, not just your trusted users). Tailscale node sharing is free and secure for private networks of friends, and there are lots of people using it with Minecraft: https://tailscale.com/kb/1084/sharing/
To answer the question in another thread, node sharing also works with UDP. (Funnel is TCP-only due to the vagaries of IP addresses and TLS certificates when facing the outside world, sigh.)
Does either Funnel or Tunnel allow this use case for old UDP-based games like Quake etc?
I would like to just be able to send strangers a temporary permalink to my server for a one-off session, then turn it off or have it expire automatically once we're finished. This would not be feasible if I have to also ask whomever I come across to install clients, as opposed to just connecting from within the game.
You can think of it as a LAN for all your devices regardless of what network they’re physically connected to.
The default use case of Tailscale is to have a private LAN, just for you, not your friends. This is changing now, though.
Tailscale does as of recently have the ability to do what you’re saying for Minecraft. It’s called Tailscale Funnel. This lets you expose a port on any of your devices to the public internet with a TLS enabled host name.
Another option for your Minecraft server is to use Cloudflare Tunnel. Works great for this kind of thing and is pretty much functionally equivalent to Tailscale Funnel.