you, my beautiful internet denizen, are a cloud, dropping little droplets of information, the same as all your other internet denizens.
eventually, all these droplets meld and share information that makes the great big beautiful internet sea.
those droplets evaporate back up into your little cloud as your funny images, music and video. you get to pick what comes back to you, which kind of breaks the evaporation metaphor, but don't think about it that much.
but what if you made the most beautiful puddle, but then it merged into an adjacent a piss puddle, ruining your beautiful, beautiful puddle?
what if your friend wants to show you their beautiful puddle, but if they bring it outside, someone might piss in it?!
💧 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧 💧
← let's bring all these guys together. invite only. →
a tailnet is a magical jar. get in my jar. this magical jar invites our friend-clouds to rain their droplets there.
it also tells our friend-clouds where they can suck droplets back up from, with the promise of piss-free droplets.
the best part is, our friends can reach that jar anytime, anywhere, even if we're sucking up other piss-puddles at the same time! it's because of tailnet magic!
^ not our puddle. not our cloud.
in dewy's adventure (2007), dewy is a water droplet who must save the forest. dewy can split, reform, and travel through the environment in ways that seem impossible for a single drop of water. but dewy is still dewy. wherever dewy goes, it is the same dewy.
your data on the tailnet is like this. connect to the tailscale. Bring dewy to the secret level where you can pick up all the Eaus. Make sure Dewy comes back to your cloud safe. Or he'll cry.
you install tailscale (the app that tells you where the magic jar is). you get added to the dewyleaks tailnet specifically (via the join the server page). then your device can always enter the jar. suck things up. spew things out.
that's it. you're in the jar now. you're welcome.