Post #1376404

2026-04-18 13:19 UTC

Something to consider about all of the efforts to sustain #IPv4 so far beyond its original shelf life. #NAT and #IPv6 were thought out at roughly the same time. NAT was a tactical move to stave off IPv4 exhaustion (at the cost of limiting the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet) and IPv6 was the strategic answer for scalable growth. The obsession human beings have to find any excuse to avoid change was highly underestimated. IPv6 took 22 years to become an Internet Standard and NAT became so entrenched that peer-to-peer networking became mostly unnecessary as long as we could continue to laugh at cat memes on our favourite platforms. This brings us to #platforms. It’s getting harder to host anything ourselves anymore without paying a (usually foreign) IaaS/SaaS platform to do it for us. We now live in an age where data sovereignty and privacy are at the forefront of our thinking and maybe, just maybe, we want other options. Is our obsession with IPv4 tying us unhealthily to platforms and sacrificing our freedoms? #SaturdayMorningThoughts

Replies (3)

@katharta@quietzero.net 2026-04-18 13:30

@ghostinthenet@hachyderm.io At some point, human beings have to communicate information to each other verbally, whether during implementation or a troubleshooting incident later on. IPv6 is many good things, but human friendly is not one of them.

Open ##2334815
@furrfu@mastodon.social 2026-04-18 14:40

@ghostinthenet@hachyderm.io I think the "lack of peer to peer connectivity" is a feature of NAT, not a bug. Most home networks contain far more devices than could have been foreseen when IPv6 was thought up, and they're all far less secure. Computers and other devices can't be trusted to "just be on the internet". That's how we get bot nets.

Open ##2334820
@kasperd@westergaard.social 2026-04-18 21:08

I have been having those very same thoughts many times. And it has lead me to ask a couple of questions. What neat things (hardware and/or software) would have been developed for us to host at home if end-to-end connectivity just worked? Have certain cloud providers deliberately run IPv4-only to slow down adoption of IPv6 in order to force more things to be hosted in the cloud?

Open ##2334823