

Here are my basic criteria:
If you want the domain to be used long-term and tie your whole online identity around it, then stay away from all novelty domains. Only use top TLDs and ccTLDs.
Novelty domains can suffer unexpected price hikes across the registry or even be discontinued because they’re basically commercial ventures.
Particularly avoid premium TLDs, because the registry can choose to hike up the price of specific domains separately from the base domain cost, just because they look “premium”. You can have the domain priced up right from under you and come renewal time you have to match the new price or lose it.
The ccTLDs of the EU member countries are a very good idea if you’re an EU citizen because they have built-in privacy for individuals (they don’t publish their info in WHOIS) and are also subject to GDPR.
Your own country’s ccTLD would be an obvious fit but price may be a consideration, some are more expensive than others. As long as you’re an EU citizen you can shop around and get a domain from any other EU member afaik, as well as .eu.
I think .de, .nl, '.frand.ro` are the cheapest, or at least they were last time I checked this a few years ago.
Please note that .de technically requires a local German address for correspondence. You can choose to skip that but if the registry ever has reason to get in touch with you and you don’t have such an address it’s grounds for suspension. Some registrars (INWX for example) will supply their own German address for you for a small extra fee, but that brings the cost of the domain in line with the others so you might as well get a .nl to begin with.


Please note that the Tailscale binaries for OpenWRT are pretty large (even if you cross-compile them with compact and strip). Your router might not have enough storage for it.
If that’s the case, you might work around it by only storing the
tailscaledbinary on persistent storage, because that’s the daemon which runs the actual connectivity. Thetailscalebinary is only used for making configuration changes, you can copy that to RAM disk, use it to set config params, then delete it.