Edit: just looked at your link. I think for the time being im going to use tailscale. Its a restaraunt, and they dont have a self-hosted server. Im trying to get around opening ports, so using an existing service. Your link did make me aware of cloudflare tunnels whick looks like it allows 50 users on a free plan vs tailscale's 3. Although the 3 might work for them, I'll have to check. Ill probably drop in an ngrok tunnel too so i can maintenence the pi remotely. (They are in a different state) i was mostly looking for advice on how to connect a port on one machine to another over a lan, and socat looks perfect
Actually, i found socat which seems to work just fine so far, and appears to be a standard linux command.