Four options, in the order you gave:
1 set up your own network (offscale)
2 use a network you already run (headscale, offscale)
3 the easy route (tailscale.com)
? what are tailscale, headscale and offscale?
? prints the long answer and then shows the options again, rather than dropping
the reader back at a bare prompt having forgotten what they were choosing
between.
The explanation frames all three as one question — who keeps the list of your
machines and hands out the keys — and says plainly that the coordination server
never carries traffic, since that is the thing people assume it does. Tailscale
and headscale are written. OFFSCALE is a marked placeholder, and so is what
option 1 actually does; both are yours to fill in and the run says so rather than
pretending.
Option 3 is the plain flow: no --login-server at all, and the auth-key prompt
says what that means — leave it blank and Tailscale prints a link that either
creates the account or adds this machine to an existing one. Option 2 keeps the
"no suggested URL" rule, because a coordination server URL is somebody's private
infrastructure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>