The services that are marketed as being VPN providers are actually selling a very restricted form of VPN where they create for you a very small VPN between you and some other node in their fleet and then you route your traffic through that node.

It would be more correct to call such a provider a secure (two-way) proxy service (and in the past people did), but for some reason they went with VPN and that stuck.

Mycoria is basically the textbook definition of a VPN.

> A VPN is used to create (the illusion of) privacy when accessing anything on the internet.

Not really. Some more recent "VPN" products position themselves that way, but traditionally a VPN has been a way to have something that behaves like a private LAN between computers that are not physically connected to each other (hence the name).

I would say that for most laypersons, VPN is used for two things: accessing your remote work resources and accessing content banned in your country.

As was patiently explained to me, Mycoria relies to quite an extent on the network effect: you can only use it if other nodes are using it, using it by yourself does not make sense. So the informed layperson's perspective is relevant here. That's why I insist on "dumbing it down" :D

To fit a layperson's understanding maybe the term VPLAN or VPWAN would work? Except I'm not sure laypeople really know what a WAN is. I think more people know LAN but then there could be confusion with VLANs.

Names are hard.

Personally this Mycoria reminds me more of a global tailnet I.e tailscale's VPN

And I guess as an extension, at least currently, Mycoria is an option for building "darknet services" except the privacy aspects aren't quite there yet compared to tor?

Yes, Mycoria is primarily about connections between network participants, eg. access your server at home without public IP, or a hybrid/fully remote team with a couple servers here and there.

In an open mesh network, you still want privacy from the other network participants.

Mycoria might have exit nodes similar to Tailscale in the future, but it won't be a fan-out multi-exit system like SPN, for example.

So 2 use-cases within grasp:

Firms could replace their VPNs for remote work with mycoria and have better security and control.

I could also set this up for my home network and access my (for example) NAS securely.

For the use-case "I want to access a publicly available page anonymously", we still need a VPN / TOR.

Yes, that is a good distinction!

To be sure I understand, in that first usecases where a company is replacing their VPN with Mycoria, would access controls/restricting access to devices is all firewall based? That technically there's a network path to all the other devices on Mycoria just limited by firewall rules?

What comes to mind to me analogously (more from my experiences than anything) is like a global tailnet that leans on firewalls to segment things?

A cross between tor and a vpn is quite appropriate too

Yes, this is correct.

Mycoria has in integrated firewall for this, just in case that information got lost somewhere.

This also means that devices of the company will help other devices of the company to reach their destination, adding to resilience in outages and emergencies.

You can of course build bridges between these networks. This definitely something that is planned.

I think your definition of VPN is a very recent consumer misappropriation.

VPN = Virtual Private Network. It’s (historically) a way of tunneling segregated / encrypted traffic over another network - generally to allow access to another private network or similar. That’s exactly what this is.

Protocol wise, consumer VPN is using traditional VPN protocols, but it’s effectively being used as secure proxy.