> self-hostable coordination server

What a long way to spell VPN :-) (been using it for a decade or so through wireguard)

No, vpn takes over your network and you have to fight weird issues on different platforms. This seems like a square peg for a round hole.

Wireguard is purely point-to-point. You have to manually specify any configuration involving routing more than just the local IP addresses you add.

Not sure if it's the best solution, but there's no reason to take over your entire network.

Even with my old OpenVPN setup I had a config where only my local 10.2.0.0/16 got routed over the VPN, everything else went straight to the outside world. Set up IPv6 ULA and you don't need to worry about IP addressing conflicts.

Not really? I mean, it's easy to set and forget which subnets get tunnelled with wireguard (and others, it's just that wg forces you to be explicit about it)

> I can't stomach same-network requirement.

The Android app let me add a peer by IP address. Once I opened traffic on the right port, it crossed a network boundary just fine.

My case was an adjacent network, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work across more hops.

Have you considered using Tailscale to get around the same-network requirement?

Tailscale doesn't support mDNS / multicast at all, making working with KDE Connect more nebulous. I attempted to add a static peer via the Tailscale hostname, but both ends report not reachable, and the Tailscale daemon is constantly dropping multicast packets. So I'm not sure how this helps, but I also don't have a use case - if I'm on my laptop, my phone is on the same Wifi network 99% of the time.

I am a heavy user of it. I don't want to stay connected to it 24/7.