Once every couple months someone makes a post saying “I just found out the Lemmy devs are TANKIES! Won’t someone do something about it?” No one has expressed real interest in forking Lemmy, though plenty of people have expressed interest in someone else forking Lemmy for them.
Most of the dev interest seems to be on Piefed right now. For some reason Mbin hasn’t seemed to really take off, I don’t see people talking about it as much.
You’re arguing two different points here. “A VPN can act as a proxy” and “A VPN that only acts as a proxy is no longer a VPN”. I agree with the former and disagree with the latter.
A “real” host-to-network VPN could be used as a proxy by just setting your default route through it, just like a simple host-to-host VPN could be NOT a proxy by only allowing internal IPs over the link. Would the latter example stop being a VPN if you add a default route going from one host to the other?
Fundamentally, a host-to-host VPN is still a VPN. It creates an encapsulated L2/L3 link between two points over another network. The number of hosts on either end doesn’t change that. Each end still has its own own interface address, subnet, etcetera. You could use the exact same VPN config for both a host-to-host and host-to-site VPN simply by making one of the hosts a router.
I see your point about advocating for other methods where appropriate (although personally I prefer VPNs) but I think that gatekeeping the word “VPN” is silly.
“It has effectively the same function as a proxy” isn’t the same thing as “it’s not actually a VPN”.
One could argue you’re not really using the tech to its fullest advantage, but the underlying tech is still a VPN. It’s just a VPN that’s being used as a proxy. You’re still using the same VPN protocols that could be used in production for conventional site-to-site or host-to-network VPN configurations.
Regardless, you’re the one who brought up commercial VPNs; when using OpenVPN to create a tunnel between a VPS and home server(s), it seems like it’s being used exactly to “create private communication between multiple clients”. Even by your definition that should be a VPN, right?
VPN and proxy server refer to different things. There’s lots of marketing BS around VPNs but that doesn’t make the term itself BS, they’re different and it’s relevant when you’re talking about networking.
This post is a great example of why they can’t just be stripped; it has hashtags used in the middle of a sentence as words, but then it also has hashtags appended to the end on their own. You’d need to handle both cases to get rid of them.