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by rapnie 510 days ago
All kinds of innovations of the network stack would be easier when IPv6 has that penetration. I saw a very cool vid by Brett Sheffield of Librecast [0] titled "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" [1] (btw, it is hosted on a decentralized PeerTube instance) and it was an eye-opener for me, as the average tech person not deeply into this stack and taking the one we have for granted (mostly).

[0] https://librecast.net

[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2

1 comments

I've wondered if this might not be a reason for some of the slow rolling. It might reduce the all-important role of cloud and centralized services in facilitating connectivity, which is almost mandatory in IPv4 world due to the existence of symmetric NAT.
Yes, I had the same feeling. There's still a massive amount of money sloshing around in cloud vendor market to ensure people remain glued to their services. And then there are a range of new technologies that are all like dark clouds threatening this digital cloud playground. Local-first, P2P networking, generic sync protocols, Wasm-everywhere, etc. where a paradigm shift in computing away from both cloud and web browser hegemony is possible, and these become optional choices instead of 'where it all happens'.

There's much more interesting innovation waiting for adoption on that lower part of the internet stack I suppose. As someone for whom that's a too specialist area I would love to have more overview of what are the promising technologies and upcoming standards to place early bets on.

The other day by accident I found out about Named Data Networking networking [0] via a paper [1] "Exploring the Design of Collaborative Applications via the Lens of NDN Workspace", and saw that NDN still sees active development after many years, so I wondered about the extent the technology still is considered promising for mass adoption today.

[0] https://named-data.net/

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2407.15234v1