depends on how you look at it. Right now it's very much a tragedy of the commons.
IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech- because it's a lot harder to make it work rather than throwing up a TURN box and relaying everything.
"The latency? Who cares? IPv6 sometimes breaks right now" - because nobody is testing it, so why should people be the first to support it? There's no easy upside.
The only real upside for businesses is not having to pay for increasingly expensive IPv4 allocations. But they don't really care, its not nearly expensive enough yet. Customers will get GCNAT, businesses will continue as normal.
All that will happen is that the internet gets slower and less equal.
Which is exactly the same thing that's happening with inefficient memory hungry software: people either have to buy a more expensive laptop or they have a shitty experience.. Nobody is advocating for them, they just feel things getting shittier year on year and many are just choosing to avoid technology instead.
>IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech-
Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content. At best you'd see something like netflix trying to offload their video hosting costs onto their customers.
Well yeah, because they can't. Maybe if they could, they would do it more. You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file. It would be popular with game servers, too.
>You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file.
bittorent has been around for decades and nobody used it. They emailed files to themselves instead, or used dropbox. This all happened before the ipv4 shortage and people getting moved to CGNAT.
internet is used by billions of people, not just you.
You sure you don't have this reversed? The average person uses the internet to watch tiktok videos and join zoom meetings, all of which is centralized. The people self hosting their NAS or minecraft server is a tiny minority.
> join zoom meetings
no reason this has to be centralised.
in fact, Jitsi uses p2p with WebRTC until a third person joins the call: then migrates the call to be relayed.
A really nice latency win.
Nobody used BitTorrent? LoL
ISPs had/have whole groups trying to stomp it out.
And it was a nightmare due to NAT even then.
It just got worse with CGNAT.
I think the commenter you’re replying to is pointing out that nobody used BitTorrent for legitimate cases. And that take is sadly correct. Despite having huge upsides, everyone just hosts on centralized CDNs, file syncing services (gdrive, Dropbox, etc).
Even Linux distros push you so direct downloads now rather than pointing to trackers.
BitTorrent only has healthy usage for content that’s untenable to host legitimately.
That is because BitTorrent has been targeted so much.
Also, hey now - I have a lot of (actual) Linux disk images, and it works well for that!
The sheer amount of times Airdrop has been the "best" way to share files takes away from your point a bit.
It's almost always faster than anything else available, and ipv6 would make that method of sending files closer to the default for most people.
Having VOIP in games or 1v1 lobbies is, in the strictest sense, "hosting" something in the same way.
FD: I work in video games so I speak from this bias.
[dead]
Obviously I can't see the future, and I live in my own bubble....
Isn't self hosting, and small, private/semi-private communities the only way forwards for much of the internet? AI has made content extremely valuable, which in turn has started to destroy the openness of the web. Things are getting more and more siloed, with entry fees.
There's a world where self hosting comes back in a big way. AI ironically makes it much easier.
> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.
How about Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming? Hosting a Minecraft server?
When Skype first came out it was P2P, but had to come up with the "supernode" concept (basically STUN/TURN/ICE) because of NAT: now all of our communication methods basically have to phone into the mothership.
Do we want the Internet to be more centralized (possibly given more power to the tech bros) or more decentralized?
Maybe the solution is to make IPv4 prohibitively expensive.
Or even just expensive.
The p2p tech argument doesn’t work anymore. Most routers ship a stateful IPv6 firewall enabled by default now because IPv6 was resulting in people’s vulnerable shit getting popped.
So p2p stuff still doesn’t work without explicit configuration that rules out 99% of your users. It’s super annoying.
Yeah, it's impossible to do anything about a stateful firewall to get p2p connections.
It's a shame because if we could only get over stateful firewalling we'd be one step closer to the impossible task of using voice chat in console video games.
Right now they don't have that of course and the only hurdle is "NAT Types" which, as we all know, is a much easier problem to solve for the average person...
(this was sarcasm, if it wasn't clear).