It's been what, over twenty years now?<p>If a technology is useful, you don't have to shame people into using it. At some point we will have to admit we made a big mistake.
There is at least one comment here that mentions CGNAT and how it enables IPv4 to continue to exist.<p>CGNAT breaks the end-to-end principle of the Internet and 100% forces you to depend on centralized services, because you will absolutely not be able to receive unsolicited traffic on your IP without coordination/permission from your ISP or other various third parties. Yes, there are NAT bypass methods-but those methods all rely at least in some situations on an external server that relays connection requests.<p>Many people really don't care if the Internet becomes the next cable TV along with business tunneling services and 2 or 3 social networks and would really be fine with that.<p>If you don't want this to be the only choice in the future, you should start learning, using, and demanding IPv6 and really stop putting NAT on a pedestal and bitching about the long addresses.<p>When I set up IPv6 on my home network, I took some time and learned how to get it working with DNS, and now I don't have to type long addresses any more. I have an actual separate IPv6 subnet for guest network. It's pretty cool.
Thanks to these technology laggards, a significant and growing number of Internet users are now participating in a sort of mix network [1] through their residential ISP or mobile carrier, who are using CGNAT/464XLAT at scale.<p>As a result it is easier to scrape a public website because the website would need to block legitimate users at the residential ISP or on the same mobile network, and this consequence is likely worse for the website than having to accept scraping. It's much harder for a website to determine that 100 requests/second from a single IPv4 address is a single user scraping away, or 100 customers each on their own phone/computer just wanting to use the website.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network</a>
IPv4 is like legacy code that got extended and dependencies added. Everybody is using it, because everybody is kind of comfortable with it and it mostly works/ people know all the workarounds for its quirks.<p>IPv6 is like the same code with a major refactor. One of the big unwieldy databases (NAT) was dropped because it turns out you don't need it if the system is smarter overall. Also, autoconfiguration works reasonably well now. For most usecases the subnetting also got much easier as you can just slap a /64 on any realistic network without hesitation. You just have to do a relatively small step to use it.
IPv6 is unwieldy. The addresses are impossible to remember and hard to type. Most people don't need to do either of those things, but the people who manage systems do. There's also little incentive for consumers and businesses to switch. The only way it'll happen is if it's imposed by large network providers.<p>Where I see it being useful is for IoT devices, where you're never configuring them manually, and where they probably only need to speak to one endpoint.<p>For anything that involves manual setup, you're going to have to force me to use IPv6, because I just don't care. Voluntary adoption is a pointless endeavor.
Why is IPv6 designed in such a way that it is hard to migrate to?<p>I've no idea if my website is IPv6 compatible. When Let's Encrypt became a thing, I pushed a button on my webhost's console and I had HTTPS. It worked for the majority of devices without needing any reconfiguration. Where's the one-click solution for IPv6?
Here is why this is relevant to anyone who's not a network admin, and why it is especially relevant to the HN crowd of tech-people:<p>If a server has no AAAA record, machines only connected to IPV6 simply cannot contact that server. This is fine in theory (just buy an ipv4 lolz) but in practices this means additional costs that will only go up, as the ipv4 space becomes more and more crowded. As a non-network admin, I care that services I'm a business costumer of are available to my servers, the biggest offender being GitHub. GitHub still does not have an ipv6 despite "looking into the issue" for several years, and this means that I am unable to use their services or indeed any software that requires access to GitHub for, say, updates, pulling artifacts, container images or whatever else from their servers.<p>It does sound like it's a bit presumptuous of me as a random IT person to demand an IPV6 out of them, but in the year of the Linux desktop, there's no reason for them not to have the infrastructure in place to simply flip a switch and be done with it, for basically free.<p>Of course, the big players own swathes of IPV4 space that they are able to rent out at a premium, so they are heavily disincentivized from ever supporting ipv6, as that means obsoleting their investment with no replacement, but it's bullshit that they are able to do this in the first place.
No one wants to deal with IPv6 except for the almost religious crowd that creates an endless blogspam on how YOU should migrate to IPv6 because it's awesome!. The only interaction I had with dedicated IPv6 users was when I blocked an entire /48 from our app due to high abuse rates and got very angry email from the owner that I'm stifling the global progress.
The main mistake hurting IPv6 adoption is and always will be that it's incompatible with IPv4 in both ways with no real solutions in sight.<p>Numerous solutions could've been thought up (CGNAT the entirety of IPv6 as a source behind a part of the IPv4 space and allocate a part of the IPv6 region for "legacy" IPv4 addresses for example; that way you have 6->4 backwards compatibility), but none were tried. The result is a great technology in a vacuum, forever hampered in adoption rate because it's not compatible with old sites and there's no incentive for old site operators to switch.<p>Shaming bad actors doesn't do anything because IPv4 vs IPv6 is largely nerd shit in terms of computer issues; your average internet user is behind CGNAT already for IPv4 so address exhaustion means nothing to them so they don't care about it.
every time I enable ipv6 on my pfsense, things go wrong, some sites don't open, some are very very slow to open like amazon prime or Disney plus have problems. Something is broken at router levels and until that's fixed, I keep it off
This website fails to convince me<p>> As we edge closer to exhausting the IPv4 address space, the immense address capacity of IPv6 becomes indispensable.<p>No explanation why this is bad. It's harder for websites to track individual users and block them. What's not to like about this?<p>> Beyond the scalability, IPv6 brings along robust security protocols and superior performance, making it the linchpin for modern, efficient, and secure internet communications.<p>Show me one person that had performance problems with ipv4
If IPv4 public addresses become scarce, they will become a feature that costs more than it does today and the problem will sort itself out.<p>That being said, I prefer shame to regulation. But both are pretty far down the list of ideal solutions.
I mean IPv4 addresses are “worth” around 50 USD a piece, so the whole address space is approaching a valuation of one trillion USD. This gets into conspiracy theory territory but I wonder if large organizations have a vested interest in keeping IPv6 adoption down, as they can rent out IPv4 addresses for a good price.<p>I’m pretty sure it’s not a large factor overall but it seems that economically it doesn’t make much sense for most existing actors to switch to IPv6 anytime soon.
i might be wrong, but i believe it's a big internal effort for these services to support ipv6 for little benefit. since most of the people are dual-stacked at the moment, they can get away with this.
The question answers itself: No IPv6 because apparently Amazon, Azure, Twitter, and all the others on the list are doing great without it.<p>When I turn IPv6 off and everything starts working normally again on my home network, it's a safe bet I'm not going to troubleshoot what the real issue is. Sure, misconfiguration at my ISP probably, but if you think I care enough to go down that rabbit hole, you don't understand how people work.