> The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6.
A couple of other practically useful things:
- You never get address collisions when connecting to someone else's VPN, or connecting to your home network via VPN from someone else's private network (if you've set that up)
- If there are two people living in your home, they can play online games against a mutual friend who doesn't live in the home without anything breaking
I think you're right that IPv6 isn't a game-changing improvement for most people. It gets rid of some annoyances, it's the obviously correct thing to do for new networks (and cheaper than setting up CGNAT), but fundamentally the pile of hacks on IPv4 is "good enough" for most use cases.
so for anyone that "just browses the web" (which is overwhelming majority) there is virtually no difference/benefit?
I don't play online games, don't use VPN, have a couple of services on my local RPi that has port forwarded on router and that's it...
ipv6 could be handy when testing some service on my laptop and trying with external services but this happens so rarely that it's not an issue... on the flipside, whenever I enable ipv6 I usually run into problems :|
One, the most obvious, is actually having distributed net and serving content from your own machine and in the ancient times like 15 years ago Opera tried that by bundling sort of local http-server (?!, can't even remember the name of the project…) but it floped... I'm not sure that ipv4 was the issue or rather the fact that people don't usually have or want their machine work 24/7...
for calls we have to rely on STUN/TURN but than again some consider this a feature as it hides external IP... which with ipv6 would be even more privacy invading?
I’m hesitant to suggest specific use cases because general purpose technologies are hard to predict in their applications. I doubt whether anyone accurately forecasted the impact of JS in the browser, for example.
However, I’d love to be able to interact with my car, CCTV cameras and other IoT devices at long distance with fewer middlemen involved.
I don't see significant difference for most private people. I guess the median has three phones, a tablet and a tv box, there's not much scope to improve the network for that use case.
But IPv6 makes a difference for some other situations. If you operate a network with routers and such, it makes sense to have all connections to internal services use IPv6. Backup, file storage, databases, management interfaces, blah: Give everything its own IPv6 address, don't accept connections on IPv4, and allow IPv4 packets from 192.168/16 only to the outside world.
It's likely the web itself has been shaped by the technology underpinning it. The article would seem to suggest something similar. Look at email. Now we all connect to the central email servers at Google and they handle most of everything else. Perhaps on the IPv6 internet, you would be able to buy a USB stick that handles all your emails for you. No more centralised mail, you just have a small server in your house that does it for you. The same of social media, etc. It would be feasible to offer an entire plug-and-play P2P internet in the form-factor and cost of a small HDD.
Would people want to own such a server? I don't know, but as it stands currently, only the centralised players in the internet sphere can afford to serve content. Perhaps our relationship to these companies would be different if there was no barrier to entry for competition. Perhaps our entire conception of the internet would be different without that fundamental limitation. Or perhaps nothing would change. The central model has its advantages, but I'd also like to be able to own my own website.
> Perhaps on the IPv6 internet, you would be able to buy a USB stick that handles all your emails for you.
You are too optimistic. Poeple can't be bothered to migrate off the google to some alternative provider (also free) and you expect them to buy a "usb stick" for local (mail) server? And then have to keep their machines up all the time and also connected constantly? (not everyone lives in the USA and have FTTH)...
I already mentioned that Opera tried something like "personal pod" 15-20 years ago and it flopped...
> No more centralised mail, you just have a small server in your house that does it for you. The same of social media, etc.
"social media" case seems interesting but again - we had mastodon for distributed social media and it's adoption is lukewarm... and now we have bluesky, which is also distributed and anyone host it and whatnot and it's userbase skyrocketed... and everyone use single instance.
All in all - people don't care about it, they want convenience and nothing else...
> And then have to keep their machines up all the time and also connected constantly?
The idea would be that you plug the stick into a USB port, then it just draws power from the wall and serves files over WiFi. Similar to the Amazon Fire TV stick, it would be a full computer in a small form-factor.
> and everyone use single instance
I wonder if this has anything to do with how difficult it would be to set up your own instance? We already have distributed social media, it's called websites. I think having your own website is pretty appealing to a lot of people. BlueSky is really just a worse version of HTTP with page indexers, which only needs to be that way because of NAT.
> All in all - people don't care about it, they want convenience and nothing else...
I know that people will not bother to migrate off their current software, but the product has its own pros and cons. Perhaps if they were presented with both options when they first obtained an email address, they would have made different choices.
And actually, I think people do care quite a lot. Even something as simple as sending a file to someone is massively complicated by NAT. People don't like the fact that they need to trust their digital lives to a handful of massive American companies. That people lack knowledge of the alternatives is not a sign that there are no better alternatives. See Ford on cars, Jobs on phones, etc.
what? the world doesn't end with fortnite or whatever brain-rot is currently popular (on utterly locked up platform with excessive anti-cheat)... there is a gazzilion of super entertaining games that you can play locally... :shrug:
A couple of other practically useful things:
- You never get address collisions when connecting to someone else's VPN, or connecting to your home network via VPN from someone else's private network (if you've set that up)
- If there are two people living in your home, they can play online games against a mutual friend who doesn't live in the home without anything breaking
I think you're right that IPv6 isn't a game-changing improvement for most people. It gets rid of some annoyances, it's the obviously correct thing to do for new networks (and cheaper than setting up CGNAT), but fundamentally the pile of hacks on IPv4 is "good enough" for most use cases.