[insert yet another comment about having short product introductions at the top pf blog posts]
From their docs page:
> Iroh lets you establish direct peer-to-peer connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. This gives you fast, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.
and iroh-blobs: provides blob and blob sequence transfer support for iroh. It implements a simple request-response protocol based on BLAKE3 verified streaming
Tailscale is a system service / DevOps deploy-time architectural middleware tool for putting entire devices onto managed OS-level networks.
Iroh is a development-time library for building software that forms open decentralized application-specific networks.
The closer comparison for Iroh would be to something like libp2p. (Or maybe libzmq, given its toolkit-of-very-well-thought-out-primitives approach. I might describe Iroh as the decentralized complement to libzmq.)
I'm going to guess that the difference is that Tailscale lets your machines find each other within a managed flat virtual network where as Iroh lets your applications talk to each other without any regard to which machine anything is running on.
Not sure about tailscale coordination server but once you establish connection to a headscale server, the clients don't strictly need headscale after that (although it's recommended to keep it active). So, maybe the only difference is headscale acts as a relay for once
Headscale is just a open source implementation of the Tailscale coordination server.
The coordination server just provides the IPs by which you use wireguard to connect. It can see that metadata (what machines are in a tailnet), but not anything else.
I’m also wondering if it’s possible to use MoQ from iroh, for streaming unidirectional broadcast data that don’t need historical buffers, mainly to freeload on Cloudflare’s free MoQ relays.
Also how do the public relays provides by Iroh compare with Tailscale’s public DERP servers, operationally wise?
From their docs page:
> Iroh lets you establish direct peer-to-peer connections whenever possible, falling back to relay servers if necessary. This gives you fast, reliable connections that are authenticated and encrypted end-to-end using QUIC.