[superkuh]

Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address. They're behind carrier NAT unable to participate like a real computer. They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part.

If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform. If ipv6 gets adopted fast enough it might just save the 'net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television.

[echelon]

> net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television.

This is such a great analogy.

The Internet has become a dopamine fix. Platforms are generic and inflexible. (Remember when you could change the HTML?) Content is watered down or demonetized for the sake of ad money (Youtube, Tumblr). You can't read the news without getting a video ad shoved down your throat. Commercial video is DRM'd. Browsers (read: Chrome) enables websites to prevent you from copying text or viewing source images. Your every move is tracked to better target ads and sell your profile.

[madars]

re: being prevented from copying the text -- one can just use Stylus + the following stylesheet

    * {
      -webkit-user-select: text !important;
      user-select: text !important;
    }

+ others for saving Instagram pictures, removing hangouts.google.com background, etc

It is incredible how much more palatable the web becomes with uBlock Origin + uMatrix + Stylus. Not optimistic for the web in the long term, though.

[throwaway-9320]

There are websites which can and will manipulate the text you are copying. I am aware of at least one news site which will replace the copied article text with a short summary and a link to the article.

Example: https://www.ghacks.net/2016/05/24/chrome-copy-text-manipulat...

[HeckFeck]

> They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part.

Your comment brings a whole new angle to IPv6 I hadn't before considered. Having each packet routable straight to a TCP/UDP port number eliminates the complexities of NAT. Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains.

[wmf]

Since the {hard,soft}ware that handles NAT wouldn't be needed, perhaps a shift to IPv6 could also give throughput gains.

It does, although barely noticeable. More noticeable is the cost to ISPs for carrier-grade NAT equipment.

[ATsch]

IPv6 is already faster on it's own, because the packet header was modified to be more easily routed in hardware.

[snuxoll]

We also took advantage of the stupid huge address space to make routing tables smaller, it's not necessary to have every /24 (or /64 in IPv6 equivalents) in your tables because we can assign big blocks and stop dealing with fragmented networks all over the place.

[gerdesj]

Yes, provided your ISP allocates you a P2P link as well as your prefix. Once you get used to breaking up your prefix into subnets it all starts to work quite nicely.

I have even found that real world IPv6 addresses are not quite as bad as they look. We have all seen the auto-generated ones and they look awful but you don't actually use those as such. For example you are allocated a /48 prefix: 2001:db8:1234:: in general you might think of the ISP as 2001:db8:: and your site as 2001:db8:1234::. Your first subnet might be say 000a or simply "a" for VLAN 10 because you decide not to allocate IPv6 to your default VLAN 1 and start with your current PC VLAN which is 10.123.10/24. In IPv4 you have 10.123.10.1 as the default gateway (VRRP) with .2 and .3 for the physical routers. Hence your PC VLAN routers get given 2001:db8:1234:a::2 and 3 and ::1 for the VRRP address. You can play games with 1337 addresses using 0-9a-f eg face:b00c sigh.

[yyyk]

In practice we'll still be traffic shapred on ISP level so not so much P2P. It's far more likely that IPv6 will be used to give everyone one single unique trackable address* and we'll all be easily tracked down by IP again. The practical semi-privacy IPv4 let people have will be gone.

Ultimately, technologies are less important than public opinion, politics and commerce in dictating how the net goes.

* Or a single trackable address range, no matter. Yes, ISPs could do differently. Why would they? All the incentives are on the other side.

[peterwwillis]

> Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again

Sorry, but this is incorrect. No matter how you connect to the internet, someone has to agree to route your traffic. Just having an allocation of "public" address space doesn't mean you are free to do whatever you want. Other people have to actually pick up your traffic.

If you don't have an ASN and a core router on a backbone to announce and carry your traffic, and instead are just using what an ISP gave you, you really have almost no control over whether that address is routable, what protocols you can use with it, etc. They can impose the same limits on IPv6 as IPv4 - and in order to reduce overt abuses of their network resources, they almost certainly will.

Remember: passing packets requires real money. The larger the number of packets, the larger the bandwidth used, the larger the concurrent connections, the more money it costs. Any segment in the network that takes up significantly more traffic than another, will end up costing a disproportionate amount of dollars and maintenance to support. So unless you're paying for all of it, you will have limits. And just like every other resource on the planet, some people will have more resources than others.

IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet.

[throw0101a]

> IPv6 is identical to IPv4 in terms of what "freedom" you have on the internet.

It is easier to offer services on IPv6 IMHO. If you want to have some boxes at home to SSH into, you need to provide port forwarding after the first.

So for the first system in IPv4 you would have pubip:22 -> inta:22, but then you have to do pubip:23 -> intb:22, pubip:24 -> intc:22, etc.

With IPv6 you can just use the hosts' IPv6 addresses and punch holes for :22 for each individual system as desired: no port tomfoolery needed.

[peterwwillis]

Sure, but you're talking about using NAT vs not using NAT. You can still get a dozen IPv4 addresses from an ISP and do the same thing as IPv6. But you have to pay for 'em.

The ISP can decide to impose exactly the same limit on allocated IPv6 as IPv4, and charge you for more hosts. Your freedom hasn't changed, only your billing has.

[throw0101a]

I can get a static IPv4 address for a nominal fee with my residential account. My ISP also gives me a /56, so I have quite a few addresses to play with without a 'business account'.

So from where I'm standing IPv6 is not identical to IPv4.

[bartwe]

That is the ideal. But i dont see the home router nat going away. Infact in many ways it is a good thing every home has a nat/firewall going, removing that for ipv6 would be a step backwards. Better and more reliable upnp would be nice.

[ownagefool]

You'd want the firewall configured with default deny, but there's no need to keep the NAT.

[criddell]

> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform.

Do you think the adoption of IPv6 would lead ISPs to drop their ban on running servers from non-business accounts?

[lxgr]

Not allowing inbound connections is arguably a feature for most users, not a bug.

I don't think that even given widespread IPv6 adoption, we'll ever go back to a model where residential or mobile internet connections will allow for public reachability by default.

Of course, NATs and firewalls are not the same thing (you just effectively happen to get the latter when deploying the former). But I firmly believe that the bulk of technologies that give us dynamic endpoint lookup and coordinated firewall traversal will outlive IPv4 and NAT.

As an anecdotal example, I used to have a mobile data plan that assigned a public IPv4 address to my phone, including inbound TCP/UDP reachability! That's neither good for battery life, nor for data consumption (on a metered plan). By contrast, my current one puts me behind a carrier grade NAT, but I have no problems whatsoever making peer to peer VoIP calls to friends behind the same type of NAT.

[Havoc]

>ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address.

Given how sht the security on IoTs is I'm not convinced giving everything a routable IP is a good idea frankly. At least not until the IoT players up their game significantly

[noodlesUK]

Unfortunately NAT has made us lazy. If even a small number of a particular type of IOT device is being deployed on native IPv6 networks, you’ve got to face the security consequences anyway.

Also NAT is not a firewall, but that’s a story for another day.

[jacquesm]

NAT is a poor person's firewall, and even if everybody were to switch to IPV6 I believe that NAT'ing would be here to stay. There are lots of disadvantages to sitting behind a NAT but the positive part of it is that it actually does have some security benefits. I used to absolutely hate NAT but over the years I've come around a bit, and UPnP made it bearable from a tech point of view.

[ATsch]

This is completly incorrect. While NAT is almost always combined with a stateful firewall, the NAT itself does not provide any security.

Home devices are always going to be deployed with an allow outgoing, deny incoming firewall, regardless if they have IPv6 or not. They are identical in terms of security.

[jedberg]

> This is completly incorrect. While NAT is almost always combined with a stateful firewall, the NAT itself does not provide any security.

It most certainly does. If you have an insecure device behind a nat, say something with telnet sitting open, a port scanner from the outside won't be able to find it (unless you've gone to great efforts to allow inbound connections without an established outbound connection). This is objectively better than if that device were directly addressable.

> Home devices are always going to be deployed with an allow outgoing, deny incoming firewall, regardless if they have IPv6 or not.

Not always. My last router came with the firewall off and that was just a few years ago. A lot of consumer ISPs don't bother with the firewall because they don't want to field customer service calls about things not working.

[lostlogin]

> A lot of consumer ISPs don't bother with the firewall because they don't want to field customer service calls about things not working.

This is amazing. How does it work? What stops me going to the devices behind the router?

[ATsch]

Nothing, apart from IPv6' ginormous address space.

However, I have yet to see proof of any provider that actually deployed home routers this way.

[Dagger2]

If you looked, I'm sure you could find somebody somewhere. It's not even close to common though.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> It most certainly does.

No, it doesn't. It's a commonly believed myth among people who don't have a clue how IP works, though.

> If you have an insecure device behind a nat, say something with telnet sitting open, a port scanner from the outside won't be able to find it

Why not?

[icedchai]

When most people say "NAT", they really mean "PAT". Port address translation: multiple private IP addresses behind a single public IP address. When a non-pedantic person sees "NAT", they understand it is actually "PAT." And in the typical consumer configuration, it actually does provide some level of security.

[Dagger2]

And when people talk about "PAT", they're actually talking about a form of NAT that doesn't block connections.

Here's how you do "PAT" on Linux: `iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wan0 -j MASQUERADE`. Notice how it's limited to outbound connections ("-o wan0")? That means it doesn't apply to inbound connections, and thus doesn't have any effect on the behavior of inbound connections.

If it doesn't have any effect on the behavior of inbound connections, then how could it possibly block inbound connections?

(The typical consumer configuration pairs "PAT" with a firewall, and the firewall does block inbound connections. It's also typical to pair it with RFC1918 addresses, which doesn't block connections but does make it much harder for most people to make the relevant connections in the first place. None of that changes the fact that "PAT" doesn't block connections.)

[rtempaccount1]

In standard consumer networking, say I have a /24 (say 192.168.1.0/24) and one dual-homed host performing Network Address Translation to a Internet routable address, how would an attacker easily initiate a connection to one of the hosts on that internal subnet from somewhere on the Internet?

They obviously can't address traffic directly to 192.168.1.0/24 over the Internet as that's a bogon address and the Internet routers will either reject it out of hand, or not know where to send it.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> They obviously can't address traffic directly to 192.168.1.0/24 over the Internet as that's a bogon address and the Internet routers will either reject it out of hand, or not know where to send it.

That's not obvious at all. Now, you obviously can't just inject a packet addressed to 192.168.1.1 anywhere on the internet and expect it to turn up on any particular LAN, but that just excludes a subset of the possible attack vectors for unwanted inbound connections.

Your ISP can still send you packets addressed to 192.168.1.1. Thus, obviously anyone compomising your ISP, or some subset of their routers can as well (hello Cisco hardcoded passwords!). Also, it has happened that ISPs failed to isolate customers from one another (think multiple customers on the same VLAN), so your neighbour could send packets addressed to 192.168.1.1 to your router's WAN interface as well. Or potentially malware on their network, if someone were to systematically exploit such a setup.

It isn't even unheard of that ISPs forgot to disable routing protocols on customer-facing interfaces and some CPE managed to advertise their RFC1918 space via RIP to their ISP's access network.

Or, for that matter, an attacker could just hook into your uplink between you and your ISP, if you are a valuable enough target, to gain access to your CPE's WAN interface.

All of those are actually solved security-wise by having a stateful firewall, which will also prevent inbound connections from anywhere else on the internet.

[jacquesm]

You're technically correct but in practice ever since NAT has been a thing routers have stopped passing on incoming connections to the machines behind it unless specifically - and usually laboriously - configured to do so. This is also why NAT is considered hostile to a peer-to-peer internet, which prompted this very good article:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

by John Walker, of Autodesk fame.

The router has a public IP and everything behind it has a local one. That you can do NAT in different contexts and that technically you could have NAT without the firewall functionality doesn't change that this is 99.9% of all NAT applications.

A bit more text about this concept:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/176744/why-is-n...

[ATsch]

I think this distinction is very important, for the following reason: Once you've acknowledged that firewalls are technically optional, but used in 99% of cases, there's no reason to say why home routers wouldn't come out of the box with IPv6 firewalls in 99% of cases too.

And this is in fact what we see in the real world with IPv6 deployments. Roughly 50% of my country has IPv6, and every single provider provisions it with sensible default firewall rules.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

By that same logic, NAT provides internet connectivity. 99.9% of all NAT applications come with an internet uplink. Therefore, you need NAT for internet access. Not.

[gregmac]

> NAT itself does not provide any security

This is just arguing semantics. It's not "NAT itself", but a side effect of using it is that it requires deliberate effort to allow inbound connections to get to devices behind the router. This has many of the same effective security benefits as a firewall blocking inbound connections does.

Another way of saying this: the companies that make cheap, crappy routers can do the absolute bare minimum and not end up exposing internal devices to inbound internet traffic. So NAT provides security against the cheap, crappy router manufacturers.

With IPv6, the opposite is true: The router manufacturer has to do deliberate extra effort to block inbound connections, beyond just making the router "work". Will most router manufacturers do this extra effort and include a properly-configured firewall? Probably yes, especially if they don't want to get a terrible reputation for being insecure, which would (hopefully) eventually drive them out of business.

Will absolutely 100% of them always do this properly and never make a mistake? I wouldn't bet on it.

[nybble41]

> It's not "NAT itself", but a side effect of using it is that it requires deliberate effort to allow inbound connections to get to devices behind the router.

Unless your router has UPnP port forwarding enabled—as most home routers do by default, since popular apps require it—in which case any device can open a hole in the firewall for whatever incoming traffic it wants. In this scenario NAT provides no additional protection beyond what the client device could provide for itself by simply not accepting incoming connections. To get security from a NAT setup you need to disable UPnP and manually configure any required port forwarding, which is at least as much effort as properly configuring an IPv6 firewall.

The right solution IMHO is to have a separate LAN/WLAN/VLAN for the untrusted IoT devices which rejects all inbound connections from the WAN (no UPnP support) as well as all outbound connections to the main LAN. Outbound connections to the WAN for updates or cloud-base control are permitted but logged; inbound connections from the main LAN are also permitted, to control the IoT devices locally. For the main LAN the router should only perform basic filtering for malformed or misrouted packets—ones with an external or multicast destination address or an internal source address, for example. Apart from that, devices on the main LAN are expected to handle their own security. Laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are already required to handle this since they are routinely connected directly to untrusted networks.

[dboreham]

In my experience upnp is no longer enabled by default (because: not secure). UDP hole punching usually works though.

[mike_hock]

My guess is the firewall functionality will stay as long as IPv4 and thus NAT remain relevant. Once IPv4 has faded into obscurity, we'll see the advent of IPv6-only routers that are really only dumb routers ... and wireless access points.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

But that just isn't true. There is nothing in NAT that requires dropping inbound connections, so crappy router manufacturers might be failing to do so right now. If there is no firewall on the device, it won't prevent inbound connections, no matter how much NAT it does.

[anticensor]

NAT66 is something real.

[jandrese]

In theory NAT provides no security. In practice it does.

The way common household NAT works is you have hosts on a private IP space behind a NAT device with an ephemeral internal IP/port table. When an internal device initiates a connection outward the NAT device takes a note of the IP address and port it is connecting to and writes them to the table, along with its own port mapping.

When a packet arrives addressed to the NAT device it checks the table and if it finds a matching entry it rewrites the packet and forwards it back to the original host.

So someone attempting to make a new connection to an internal host is effectively firewalled off by the lack of a mapping table.

Now most people who say "NAT isn't a firewall" are referring to the case where you have for some reason turned off the default firewall rules on the NAT device and have somehow routed a packet with a destination address that is on your internal network. In this case, the NAT will just forward the packet onto your internal host and provide no protection as they say. However, it ignores the difficulty of getting your ISP to route an RFC 1918 address to your NAT device in the first place. The very fact that your internal hosts are on non-routeable addresses is a form of protection provided by NAT.

[Dagger2]

> So someone attempting to make a new connection to an internal host is effectively firewalled off by the lack of a mapping table.

The lack of a mapping table entry just means that your packet doesn't get translated. It doesn't mean that inside hosts are unreachable.

> Now most people who say "NAT isn't a firewall" are referring to the case where you have for some reason turned off the default firewall rules on the NAT device

Yeah, so: NAT isn't a firewall. The firewall is a firewall. NAT is typically deployed together with a firewall precisely because NAT isn't a firewall.

This is an important distinction, because it means that the security you think you're getting from NAT is actually coming from the firewall, meaning you don't need NAT to get that security.

Note that I'm not ignoring the issue of reaching non-routeable addresses either. Your ISP can route to your LAN range easily, and there are plenty of people who could trick or force your ISP into cooperating. If you want to be secure, you can't rely on "probably I won't receive any evil connections, it'll be fine", you need to actually block them. If you're in a situation where non-routeability is relevant then you were already insecure.

You've also forgotten that NAT doesn't provide you with non-routeable addresses, even if it's typically deployed with them. It works on any address range and it has no impact on the routeability of the range you use. NAT is also not required to use non-routeable addresses (which as mentioned aren't even secure in the first place). So, again, it provides no security.

[peterwwillis]

> They are identical in terms of security.

A bit incorrect. There are IPv6 protocol changes (ex. ICMP vs ICMPv6) where the newer protocols are more secure. But actually having a private IP behind a NAT gateway is more secure in general, because nobody can directly route to a host behind your NAT, without exploiting reverse NAT traversal. IPv6 will allow easier exploitation of default host configurations due to being able to route to them easier.

[Dagger2]

Will it? You'd still have to get around the router firewall, the host would have to have no firewall of its own and be exploitable and also you'd have to _find_ the host first.

This also needs to be balanced against the difficulty of exploiting servers that have been deliberately exposed to the internet, for example cameras or NASs. People often expose those deliberately (via port forwards on v4) so they can access them remotely.

v6 will make it harder to exploit those devices, because it makes it harder to find them in the first place. Most botnets that run on cameras etc spread via random network scanning, so making those devices harder to find makes it harder for botnets to spread. You can consider this akin to vaccination's effect on the R value for a contagious disease: vaccination can eliminate a disease even when it doesn't eliminate 100% of infections. If a botnet can't find enough vulnerable hosts to exploit, it'll die out.

NAT with port forwards makes it far easier to find devices like that, because it reduces the search space. v4 reduces the search space further still, to the point where it's quite feasible to do an exhaustive search.

On balance, I think this makes the larger address space (without NAT) less exploitable.

[mindslight]

A stateful firewall that rejects incoming connections is conceptually simple even without NAT.

NAT itself does have the security benefit of masking more bits of client identity though. If I had a bunch of machines on an ip6 prefix, I would still want their outgoing connections to be NATted, to avoid address-based tracking.

[ecksii]

That isn't really necessary any longer. Modern IPv6 stacks devices use and periodically rotate through temporary IPv6 auto-allocated addresses for privacy reasons.

[mindslight]

AFAIK "privacy extensions" are just designed to avoid putting the (customarily) fixed MAC address onto the wider Internet. If each device still has a specific /128 at any given time, then the number of devices and the connections from the same device can be inferred - the statistical distribution is still drastically different than per-connection NAT.

We can envision a better version where each device pulls multiple addresses at a time and rotates through them basically per-topic, but I don't think stacks are really set up to do that. But sure we could get there eventually, at least modulo outdated firmware stuck with said vulnerabilities. On the other hand, if we already need maintained premise routers to manage incoming connections, they can simply NAT outgoing connections and get a perfect probability distribution across IP6+port that fully masks the internal network.

Ultimately I think the distinction between "outgoing" and "incoming" connections is only going to continue increasing, regardless of IP6.

[stingraycharles]

Most IPv6 routers allow you to keep the same behavior as NAT, e.g. simply do not allow new incoming connections to your prefix.

Not saying that you’re incorrect, but the problem might not be as big as you think.

[dspillett]

NAT is really firewalling at all. It just accidentally implies a "default block new inward" policy, which any good actual firewall setup for IPv4/IPv6/other would have as a default anyway.

Were it not for home routers supporting NAT because they need to with IPv4, the same routers would have a basic firewall with that default block rule in place.

[jacquesm]

I think you meant 'isn't', and we're in agreement. It is just that it has some of the same effects.

[dspillett]

Yep, small accident between the brain and the typing fingers there.

[mindslight]

> If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform

No, it really doesn't. It makes easier one aspect of developing peer to peer software. Which sure is a good thing, but it's not some panacea. Our regressive software landscape didn't come about because end users simply didn't have easy access to routeable IP addresses. But rather because tinkering with software can be tedious, developing easy to use software takes resources, and the most straightforward way of recouping that investment through surveillance and control.

Right now, you can get a VPS with perfectly routable addresses for $5/mo. And if you're not interested in or able to afford that, you're certainly not going to leave your own machine up 24/7 as a server. In reality, IP/DNS is a namespace that's terrible for user-facing systems - it itself causes centralization by necessitating that singular authoritative servers answer requests for a named object. What we actually need for a non-corporate net is higher level addressing such as content concentric networking (IPFS et al).

(I've gotten some downvotes, and I would be really interested in hearing the actual disagreement. I know we're all biased to think this paradigm of IP4/6 could do everything we want, if only it were used "correctly". But after a few decades of watching things evolve I just don't see how it's sufficient for de-centralization).

[close04]

> be their own platform

The public commercial platforms offer far more than just a routable IP. You get reach, reliability, resilience, and security (the kind you don't get to build yourself).

Being your own YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. platform means almost nobody will ever hear about you, the ones that do can easily wipe you off the internet, coming back is a real hassle, and that your data will leak is basically a forgone conclusion. Being your own Dropbox/GDrive may not need the reach but still relies the other three to provide value. And the list can go on for almost anything you can think of for "being your own platform".

The overwhelmingly vast majority of people have little to no interest in building and maintaining any such platform. It's why so few people actually do it today even when having a routable address. It's inconvenient even for skilled people, let alone regular ones.

I'll wait for a counterargument.

[wizzwizz4]

Huh. So, nobody's heard of PeerTube (https://www.joinpeertube.org/), Friendica (https://friendi.ca), Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) or Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/). The overwhelming majority have little to no interest in building and maintaining such things. Interesting…

(It's fine to assert things, but make sure you're right first. Asserting things you don't know to be true is disingenuous, and a bad habit.)

[tsimionescu]

Yes, by comparison, approximately no one in the world has heard of PeerTube, Friendica, Mastodon or Disapora. And even of those that have heard of them, few actually use them. Centralized platforms for these things are simply so much more convenient and discoverable that there really is no competition.

Look at the speed with which WhatsApp was adopted (talking about before the FB acquisition), and compare to Mastodon or Diaspora - there is no contest.

[wizzwizz4]

Mastodon is big news in India at the moment, to the point that some newspapers are trying to pretend it's centralised and "hates right-wing people" (because one instance refused an account to a police organisation).

If it's getting newspaper coverage, it's probably not all that niche.

[close04]

None of those are your own platform. You have a share in them. Their value isn't in being "your own", it's explicitly in being "nobody's own" or "everyone's", depending on how you read it.

If you somehow use them only for yourself so they run effectively as "your own" (assuming you can and want to isolate them) you run into the same issues I mentioned above.

Your comment in brackets applies very much now ;).

[echelon]

Back in my day bittorrent was pretty popular.

We'd have doused Zuck's dorm room sever in gasoline if we'd known what was to happen.

[close04]

But that wasn't your own platform was it? It was explicitly distributed. The crux of my comment was the "own" part. You don't just have a share in it, it's yours.

[echelon]

The desire to own and control is what led us to where we are.

Let's go back to distributed. Let content proliferate according to novelty and interest gradients. Don't tax it. Don't rent seek.

There are ways to profit without ruining it for everybody else.

[close04]

The comment I was replying to clearly states "be their own platform" which is why I replied to it. What you're saying is a completely different conversation and the arguments don't dismiss what I said: the number of people who can successfully "be their own platform" is statistically insignificant so IPv6 is irrelevant for this purpose in particular.

I still don't understand how bittorrent (or any decentralized platform) is "your own platform". Most people will always just be part of someone else's platform. Whether it's YouTube, PeerTube, or friendica, it's never their own and IPv6 won't change that. And they explicitly sell themselves as distributed which by definition makes them shared, everybody's, or nobody's. They can never really be your own and that's exactly what their appeal is.

Most people are unable (due to skill, money, or effort constraints) to manage their own platform. And the ones who can don't need to wait for IPv6.

[chipotle_coyote]

While people seem to be unhappy with this argument and are downvoting it, it gets at a fundamental truth about "big silos" vs. "own your own content": the vast majority of the world isn't on Facebook and Twitter rather than individual Jekyll and Mastodon instances because they're waiting for widespread IPv6 adoption. There are substantial usability hurdles for the Average User in doing this sort of thing, and if we're really serious about letting more than tech nerds "be their own platform," that needs to be addressed.

Having said that, it's still possible to hear about independent websites, nobody can "easily wipe me off the internet," and I'm pretty sure my data is far more likely to leak from actual YouTube/FB/Twitter/someChan/etc. than it is from a non-monetized, advertising-free Mastodon instance, let alone my static website. But it's also absolutely true that the best way for me to drive traffic to my web site is getting linked from Twitter or Reddit; discovery is one of the big problems for federated, decentralized networks.