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by LoganDark 77 days ago
> What kind of applications and services are not being invented because we're stuck with the current non-P2P / centralized setup of IPv4+NAT?

I don't know? I've never had CG-NAT and yet I've never seen a piece of software that takes advantage of that except maybe for games that use UPnP to open ports.
3 comments
vel0city 77 days ago
> I've never seen a piece of software that takes advantage of that except maybe for games

Maybe we haven't seen many products available on the market to take advantage of it because the current standard of NATs make such things practically unworkable?

Its pretty much impossible to ship smart home stuff that is hosted locally (i.e. not without it connecting to some cloud service) because people want to access these smart devices from outside their home. They're not likely to configure a VPN to connect home, they're not going to configure NATs in any workable fashion (or may be unable to, such as CGNAT), the applications probably don't want to have to handle having NAT hairpinning issues, etc.

So instead we continue down everything that's popular being something that requires a cloud proxy/relay (because that's the only way things actually work for most people), when in reality if things could just be public we could do a whole bunch more and empower people to easily host things themselves.

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throw0101d 77 days ago
> I don't know? I've never had CG-NAT and yet I've never seen a piece of software that takes advantage of that except maybe for games that use UPnP to open ports.

Which, as a sibling comments mentions, is the point.

The fact that (CG-)NAT is in the way could be precluding the development of "software that takes advantage of that". It's a form of (negative/inverse) survivorship bias: kind of like zoning for only single-family homes and yet saying "no one wants mid-rise towers/apartments as evidenced by the fact no one building them". The current rules/structure/architecture preclude any other options.

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direwolf20 77 days ago
Games, voice/video chat (especially open source ones), stuff like Tailscale, stuff like Magic Wormhole, ... stuff like Dropbox.

Is there anything you do on a computer that involves communicating with another user? That's not just anything - that's most things! All communication between two computers is improved by not requiring NAT.

Corporations love to keep us dependent on their central servers, of course.

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