Amber (@amber@toot.site)
💀
@abloo
Why support it if you can dynamically allocate IPv4 in ways so that you don't run out of them?
things like a nat don't let users set up anything like a game server that can be joined by somebody else; nats also have users share an IP address, so if a service IP bans one person they can ban hundreds or thousands of people instead of the one person they intended to
@abloo
NAT wasn't even what I had in mind. Here's the thing, the big boogeyman of why IPv6 was being pushed so much some time ago was the development of smartphones and other IoT devices. But we've slowly discovered that most of the time smartphones get their internet from a WiFi network instead of the cell tower. Meaning, most of the time, you don't actually need a dedicated IP address for your phone. So phone ISPs can just dynamically allocate and deallocate IP addresses as needed.If at any one time no more than 30% of your users actually use cell internet, why get IPs for 100% of the users? You can easily get by with 40-50% and switch the IP to someone else when they're not using it.
Heck, since you're not gonna host servers from your phone anyway, it's even easier to do NAT for phones and save up even more IPv4 addresses. (I know for a fact phone providers seem to do this in my country, so not unreasonable to think they're doing it in lots of other places).
The fact is, the IPv4 crisis has been averted simply because we've discovered we're not actually using phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices like we thought we would be using them 15-20 years ago. In the earlier days of the internet, we would think that every internet device needed it's own unique IP. But in reality, you can have, at home, half a dozen smartphones, a couple of tablets, laptops, a PC or two, a console, and countless other IoT devices, all connected to the internet, with only 1 public IP, and everything working just fine. And in fact, we're used to preferring this setup as it can provide a bit more security from outside attacks.
I don't know if in America, or other parts of the world the transition was actually needed because providers simply didn't have enough IPv4 addresses bought, but where I live, I've yet to see an IPv6. And ISPs here are still equipped well enough to provide very fast internet, so it's not a "we're too cheap to upgrade equipment" issue either.
P.S. As for connecting to IPv6 servers, that could very much be a bad server config problem as much an ISP thing. Just don't jump to conclusions.
