I saw the one in Houston for the first time last week. It was so cool. My favorite spacecraft as a kid, but in real life it was about 4x as big as I expected.
I'm fine with 16 but they should have only used the bytes as they were needed, at least for 5 and 6 byte addresses, so those who desire short addresses could buy them.
fe80:: is for link local. You'd want to use something starting fc00:: or fd00::
In your typical home environment, just set your ULA to fd00::12 instead of 192.168.0.12, or fd00:16:34 instead of 192.168.16.34
Yes you'll run into issues if you were to later want to merge your private IPs with someone else, and you should use fd12:3456:7890::12 instead, remembering those extra 10 digits, but its not a problem at home, and no more of a problem with business mergers than ipv4 clashes anyway.
My vrrp address for my dns server at home is 2001:8b0:abcd::53
It's about as easy to remember as 81.187.123.45//192.168.0.53
Almost all ipv6 addresses I encounter start with 2001, so I just need to remember my home prefix is 8b0:abcd, which is about the same length as my home public IP of 81.187.123.45
::53 means subnet zero host 53, which is easier to remember than which rfc1918 range I used (and basically is the equivalent of remembering the 2001:: prefix)
If I have an internal server I'd have on 192.168.4.12 I could address it with 2001:8b0:abcd:4::12 just as easily, with the "4.12" translating to "4::12", and the "81.187.123.45>192.168.x.y" translating to "2001:8b0:abcd:x::y"
Just because slacc gives you an extra 64 bits of randomness doesn't mean you need to use them.
Being essentially impossible to memorize is one of the worst attributes of IPv6. I memorize and manually type IPv4 addresses all the time and it's super useful.
> My DNS "server" is a router which can "add" static entries...won't work with dynamic addresses.
Sounds like a pretty poor setup, systems which could auto-add DHCP'd or discovered entries have been around for literally decades. You're choosing to live in that limitation.
> What redundancy, multiple servers?
Multicast name resolution is a thing. Hosts can send out queries and other devices can respond back. You don't need a centralized DNS server to have functional DNS.
Oh yes, that's really convenient for home users. "Install this thing on several computers and keep it in sync or you're not qualified to have a network"
Home users would ideally be served by things like mDNS and LLMNR, which should just work in the background. If I want to connect to the thermostat I should be able to just go to http://honeywell-thermostat and have it work. If I want to connect to the printer it should just be ipp://brother and I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server.
Your interface has a default gateway configured for it, doesn't it? Isn't that default gateway the router? NDP should show the local routers through router advertisements. There is also LLDP to help find such devices. LLMNR/mDNS provides DNS services even without a centralized nameserver (hence the whole "I shouldn't even need to have a DNS server"). So much out there other than just memorizing numbers. I've been working with IPv6 for nearly 20 years and I've never had an issue of "what was the IP address of the local router", because there's so many ways to find devices.
Even then nobody is stopping you from giving them memorable IP addresses. Giving your local router a link-local address of fe80::1 is perfectly valid. Or if you're needing larger networking than just link-local and have memorable addresses use ULAs and have the router on network one be fd00:1::1, the router on network two be fd00:2::1, the router on network three be fd00:3::1, etc. Is fe80::1 or fd00:1::1 really that much harder to memorize than 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1, if you're really super gung-ho about memorizing numbers?
Adding two extra bits to each octet, making each octet range from a still memorable 0-1023 rather than 0-255, would result in an addressing scheme 256x larger than all of IPv4 combined. The entire internet works fine even when IPv4 was nominally exhausted. NAT and CGNAT are not sins, they're not crimes, and there's no rational reason to be as disgusted with them as IPv6 fans are. Even then, IPv4 exhaustion wasn't really a true technical problem in the first place, it was an allocation problem. There are huge /8 blocks of public IPv4 space that remain almost entirely unused to this day.
The reason I'm an IPv4 advocate in the IPv4/IPv6 war is that the problem was "we're out of address", not "your thermostat should be natively routable from every single smartphone on the planet by default and inbound firewalls should become everyone's responsibility to configure for every device they own".
CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. Blending in with the crowd with a dynamic WAN IP is a helpful boost to privacy, even if not a one-stop solution. IPv6 giving everyone a globally unique, stable address by default is a regression in everyone's default privacy, and effectively a death sentence for the privacy of non-technical users who aren't capable of configuring privacy extensions. It's a wet dream for shady data brokers, intelligence agencies, organized crime, and script kiddies alike - all adversaries / attackers in threat modelling scenarios.
IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more opportunities to footgun with misconfigurations, being forced to waste my time learning and understanding the nuances of each (in again, what amounts to system I want nothing to do with).
"Reaching your own stuff" is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale gives you authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable. It's also opt-in for anyone who wants it, and not forced on anyone, unlike the IPv6 transition.
I don't have your problems with ipv6, and I'm actively using it.
I don't have to rely on extra commercial entities to be able to reach my network.
I did have a problem with hosting my own shit because my ISP by default does cgnat. That cost me an hour of my life to convince a party to give what used to be normal, end to end connectivity.
yes you do, the control plane is closed. Only reverse engineered by the headscale project. The control plane is necessary for the peers to find each other. If you need to rely on such a crucial part being reverse-engineered, than yes, I think it's fair to say you are ultimately relying on commercial entities.
Wouldn't easy and accessible self-hosting be a major privacy win if that's your primary concern? Sounds much more private to run a Minecraft and Mumble server on an old laptop in a friend group than paying a commercial entity like a hosting provider to know about it and have a back door.
Easy and accessible self hosting isn't the primary concern.
It's much more private and secure to run that Minecraft or Mumble server on an encrypted overlay network like via headscale + tailscale rather than exposing both services directly to the entire planet.
But again, the primary concern was only ever address space.
What I tried to express was privacy being the primary concern. The easy and accessible self-hosting on old hardware would be the uses of a home network beyond superficialities like consumption and commerce. Privacy wise headscale as a solution is still not quite there, because it either necessitates an additional third party to host the headscale server and know about all my friends, or jank like dynDNS.
The additional security gained by getting everyone involved to set up and configure separate VPNs for different community utilities is not worth it.
I wouldn't call port forwarding "huge problems". It's only one minor router setting and if you don't want to deal with it, there's the abomination called upnp.
> I wouldn't call port forwarding "huge problems".
Port forwarding has massive problems if you're running applications expecting certain ports and need multiple hosts to have public access to those ports.
Highly disagree. Middleboxes are a huge problem on global scale and have frozen any innovation below application layer. TCP and UDP even that they are on software not hardware layer cannot be updated or changed, see MPTCP efforts or QUIC giving up and building on top of UDP.
If this is so much privacy problem, IPv6 is there for many years reaching 50%+ deployments in some countries, I bet there should be concrete examples of such breaches and papers written.
> Reaching your own stuff is already a solved problem, too. Tailscale/Headscale
No address to receive communication - no problem install an app that would proxy it through someone who has the address.
Tailscale/Headscale is great, using it daily, but they are not solution to the huge already build global network created to connect devices not connecting devices because lack of digits. Global is key here.
You have to take into account seasonal trends. The summer is always higher, so yes, we’re currently below last summer, but we are above last April 1st, and this summer will be higher than last summer.
You can’t compare fall winter and spring to last July. You have to compare last July to this July, which hasn’t happened yet, but when it does, it will be higher than last July. Today (April) is higher than last April.
The reason for this is that more people are on mobile connections during the summer (kids home from school) so the summer (as well as the Christmas/new year week) are the highest points of the year.
The fact that it’s “flat” since last July, the high season, means it’s actually still increasing.
> Regardless, when you extrapolate that curve, when do you estimate hitting 100%?
Never? But what’s your point? IPv6 is a failure if it only replaces IPv4 for 99% of traffic?
As sad as it makes me to admit, I don't think IPv6 is ever going to happen without government intervention. Adoption is flat at under 50% over the past year. IPv6 doesn't benefit big tech. SNI routing and NAT work pretty well for centralized platforms. AWS will gladly rent us IPv4 addresses until the end of time.
For users with IPv6, the v6 path is often less constrained than then v4 path. Serving data faster/more consistently is of benefit to big tech. For a lot of users, v4 and v6 routing are different, which is also helpful for big tech. If you have two paths to the server (and happy eyeballs or something), you have more resiliance to routing issues.
Clouds are slow on v6, but CDNs are not. Adoption on eyeball networks has been very slow, and it's unlikely to speed up much, IMHO. The benefits of v6 for ISPs are not that big for established serviced with large v4 pools. For ISPs running CGNAT, more v6 means less CGNAT and CGNAT is a lot more expensive than plain ip routing. (Doesn't mean all CGNAT providers run v6, but it's an incentive).
The Internet itself is growing, so "50%" does still represent a growing number of users. Also Google's stats are missing half a billion v6 users from China.
SNI routing is such a bad way to do what should be L3 problem that people implemented PROXY protocol to send information about user's endpoint address without doing MITM.
Another way to do ipv6 without government intervention is to make it 1. actually what people want, just v4 with more bits 2. have a reasonable migration path from v4. They made something overcomplicated that disregards all existing users, and now they act like this was the only possible way to avoid address exhaustion and it's everyone's obligation to switch. Even if the govt successfully forced v6, it'd be a downgrade.
v6 mostly is just v4 with more bits, and it has a reasonable migration path from v4 too. I don't think a more reasonable migration path is even possible given the constraints of v4.
About the only thing new in v6 that's not already in v4 is SLAAC, which isn't very complicated. Routing works the same, the addresses work the same, DNS, TCP, firewalling etc all work the same. If anything they removed complexity by dropping broadcast and making NAT unnecessary.
People just have some very weird misconceptions about v6, and will frequently argue that e.g. it was badly designed for not doing a thing that it does actually do, or for not doing something impossible.
The biggest thing is all the v4 addresses are no longer valid in v6. They had a choice and went with making a separate parallel network with new routes. This means DNS DHCP etc work similarly but are completely different, and the separation between DNS v4 and v6 of course is never clear in any router UI, network config file, etc. And the routes themselves are different.
SLAAC itself isn't complicated, but it means introducing multiple kinds of addresses, which is complicated. Privacy addresses were the latest thing. The history of this has left the defaults in a wacky state, like I got a new router and idk what to expect if I enable v6 on it. Even disabled v6 on my laptop cause idk what it'll do when I join someone else's network. Default should've just been DHCP+NAT from the start, not a loaded gun aimed at foot.
And SLAAC means random addresses that are human-unreadable. "Just use DNS" but nah, nobody will do that.
That would show how quickly the data is passing into the native fetch call but doesn’t account for kind of internal buffer it might have, network latency etc
That is a way to approximate it, though I'd be curious to know the semantics compared to xhr - would they both show the same value at the same network lifecycle of a given byte?
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that
I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
That will slow down dissemination of information, but maybe that would be a good thing.
Content and opinions that change like the weather, just for clicks and engagement. It’s a long way from integrity and responsibility from these influencers.
> I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms.
Larry Wall said, way back in the 1990ies,
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that
nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
Which is kind of correlated to the fact that being behind a keyboard feels different to people than being face to face.
I think that Larry's mostly kidding and it's not really some implied threat of violence in person. Just that we're better at politeness and restraint in person because we see a real human in front of us instead of something abstract on a screen.
We can either use our real names (bad plan IMHO) or deal with the fact that without the consequences of our actions, there are a lot of arseholes around.
Moderation is the answer, I think there's no way around that. HN show's that it can be done well, reddit show's that it can be done badly. Twitter show's what happens when it's not done (yes I'm being a little extreme there).
Real names didn't stop people from being arseholes on Facebook. They did lose a lot of friends, but they also found like minded friends, so kind of a wash.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.
> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.
I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).
I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.
I'm not convinced it is social media wholesale, rather it is about size. Platforms like microblogging are more about the person, the quips, the dunking.
If you are in any small communities using social platforms like Discord/Signal (chat rooms) or Discourse (forum), it's a very different feel. Most are genuinely positive experiences.
I suppose it depends on how one defines social media. My definitions are more flexible than they used to be.
Once someone builds a reasonable Google+ clone on ATProto or ActivityPub I'd probably switch to that. I don't think we've solved reputation when it comes to decentralized identity providers yet either.
I have some serious designs for a federated reputation system that is, as far as I can tell, novel but I haven't had time to really refine it and develop a proof of concept. Just a pile of notes for now
Have a look at how labellers work in ATProto. It forms a good foundation imo, perhaps sufficient as they currently stand. Good prior art if we abstract beyond just atproto, not sure what W3C might have already in the works that is similar enough.
https://roost.tools is another group you may look into. They are broader in scope for Trust & Safety across the internet at large. Their current focus is a couple of OSS tools for builders, but the ambition is big and something to appreciate.
In the old days of the Internet where everyone was pretty much anonymous you were exposed to a reality where anyone could prove you wrong. You spent a few years online you grew accustomed of the idea that there are people there much more knowledgeable than you. It didn’t bother you that much to be wrong because everyone is wrong on something and this shaped your tolerance. You enter the social media now and that tolerance goes out of the window because you can block people, delete their comments and reign supreme in your ignorance.
That's not it. Flame wars are as old as the internet. The quality of discourse has plummeted largely due to these factors: 1) democratization of access to an audience and 2) engagement maximization algorithms. Anyone with a hot take can post it, get people angry fast, at which point the engagement maximization algorithm picks it up and carries it far and wide.
I'm a fan of smaller communities that are semi-open: invite-only, but invites aren't that hard to get. Lobsters works that way. The BlueSky folks are designing "permission spaces" [1] that might be used to build that, though it's a bit early to say.
This lead to even more strict echo chambers because they effectively kill different opinions. The bubble will become even more strict and radical to people that are not living the cult.
True, but in cultural matters I wish we had more ivory towers and (yikes!) elitist closed communities than watered down open spaces that average out to mediocrity. See niche subreddits when they go popular and devolve into dumb memes and a neverending stream of the same beginner questions.
All the public internet has brought is homogeneization rather than specialization.
while true i think it's inevitable. bots are most of the internet, limiting communities to known good actors is becoming incredibly important and the side effect of removing unknown good actors is difficult to get around
Bluesky/ATProto is (for all that concerns non-developers) a Twitter clone. I think the nostalgia of pre-enschitifed socials is pushing us to try and recreate the experience but I don’t think it would work because it’s not 2010 anymore.
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
I don't see how you can say Bluesky/ATProto is essentially a Twitter clone and turn around and just assume that Mastondon/ActivityPub is not essentailly just a Twitter clone.
This feels right. I think stronger differentiation between the big and the small is important. There's room for a "big everywhere thing," and I think ATProto is probably the wrong way to do it; as I've said elsewhere, ATProto's most important feature ("take it with you") is potentially its greatest weakness and danger.
AKA, if ATProto takes off as a big thing, you've made surveillance and data gathering by Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
I think your history of social media starts later then mine. My first encounter was with the IRC, talking to strangers was literally the point. I was 12 and had a lot of fun with my friends pretending to be older,
MSN Messenger came later, it was invite only (sorta) but we still found ways to use it to talk to strangers. MySpace was optimized to follow your friends, but almost everybody that used it used it to expand their social network outside of people we knew in the real world (MySpace was amazing btw.) Then came facebook. It went even harder then MySpace in connecting you with your friends, but still almost everybody used it outside their real world friends. Twitter sort of took social media back to the beginning before Messenger and to the IRC in strangers being your primary audience.
I always wondered about this.... in the beginning of instagram, i would follow maybe 30, 40 people, open it 2-3 times per day, and every time there would be 3-5 new photos of random stuff taken by those people (lunch/dinner plates, views from the window, beer glass on the bar, whatever).
Years later, i would follow 200 people, and i would open instagram once per day and all i'd see were random peoples photos and videos (reels? i don't know what they're called anymore), some from international influences, some like stuff that can be found on 9gag, etc. Even if i switched to "following", there would maybe be 1 photo made by a person I actually followed.
Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff? Did people change?
I guess it's even worse now, but i've uninstalled it a few years ago.
> Did the algorithm make people stop posting their personal daily stuff?
Not totally[0] but you'd almost never know it because of all the ads and other junk that Instagram insists you see before the stuff you actually want to see.
(see also YouTube, Facebook, etc.)
[0] although I know a few people who have either limited or stopped posting because they feel there's no point if people don't get to see it. Me, I post for myself (and future historians) and if other people see it, grand.
They really did worsen the ratio on Instagram: firstly, it's one ad per every two posts, secondly at least one of the two non-ad posts will be a "suggested" one unless you sleep those. You can't turn it off permanently, of course.
I do also think the novelty of posting about your life has worn off.
Twitter was amazing, not because of people microblogging about breakfast, but because it gave people/companies/orgs a way to interact directly with their audience. If you want to know what Kix cereal had to say - you could follow Kix.
> instant communication between random strangers about random topics
Yes, but it requires both parts. HN works fine between random strangers, and random topics work fine with people you know. Its the combination that is toxic.
There's also something about to be said about reposts, which expand the reach by someone else's control. Many a dunk are performed this way and bring on the mob.
Also image sharing being easy. FB is overrun with (maybe real, maybe false) images of Twitter and Reddit posts and and comments. Images also tend to encourage simplistic statements, strawman attack, out of context quotes, etc.
I find that this also applies to engagement. I’ve compulsively used Mastodon and this very site, neither of which you would probably claim to be very maliciously designed.
> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon
I second this. Even moderation of mastodon.social and related OSS projects is toxic. It was the biggest disappointment of the last couple of years to me, even worse than Twitter ever had been.
Please commit to your beliefs and sign out, don't come back, if you think that way about social media. Stop proving your point wrong by using social media like hacker news comments, if you think social media so blanketly bad, useless, & ineffective.
IMO there's huge value, these are amazing connective spaces. The sheer rank pitiful nihilism of these grievance-only walk-away shut-down views is totally unacceptable, is unhelpful in extreme, is not going to move things along in any useful way, and we need to figure out how to actually improve broadly, socially.
I can't stand that such energy drain vampire viewpoints get upvoted so consistently. Stop sucking all the energy from the room, stop draining those who want to try, especially as you use the medium you are also decrying as garbage, and log off and don't post at all. We don't deserve to be continually undermined by sucking empty try-nothing dont-care nihilism.
You must be seeing ants over the fact that you can’t put the parent commenter on some “list” that prevents me from seeing a reasoned and reasonably civil comment that you disagree with.
20,000,000 accounts out of 60,000,000 [0] have already fled Bluesky in despair and will never return to it. Including some of its own creators, like jack Dorsey.
Their technology stack is completely irrelevant because it is botted to death, its user base are aggressive, angry lunatics who drag every single new account through purity tests and struggle sessions. Okay it’s a cool stack, but I wouldn’t go there or read that shit for a million dollars.
When 30% of your accounts delete themselves and never look back, it’s not even a fringe opinion that your sites toxic and not worth engaging with. And no. I’m not going to stop reading HN or participating in a dead IRC chatroom with 10 people in it just because “social media” sites are all , in the balance, equally worthless.
The stuff that gets normalized on Twitter and the stuff that gets normalized on Bluesky both disgust me. The internet is a big place and I have other options. HN is one of the few places left where quite a lot of that is not socially acceptable.
I do think I should have the technical means to mark you down, not for a block, but to have a public or private note on file that you seem to have quite the axe to grind. Are uninterested in exploring possible value or upside, that you are anti-exploratory. Are biased to using fear and doubt to deny value, to raise up anti-value. To note, imho, that you cannot present a nuanced discussion on topics. The polemicized warning.
I think social media lacks these abilities to generate meaningful signal and review, and I think atproto begins to open a door to trying new things, to endless human exploration of how we do do the noosphere, how we interlink, after decades of it all being tightly controlled by big companies.
I'm way less interested in bans. I'm very interested in new ways to help us appraise and consider who we are engaging with. The labellers on Bluesky are just a start, are some initial heads-up visibility not to block but to give heads-up visibility into what content we are consuming, giving us great indicators like stechlab-labels offers. We have had so few improvements of visibility across the social sphere and atproto opens the door to networking any manner of content, of which moderation/appraisal is but a part. https://bsky.app/profile/stechlab-labels.bsky.social
There probably are ways to have as bad a time as you are saying on Bluesky. But I don't see that, don't know what you are talking about, and don't see the tensions like that. Yeah, it's social media and yeah people will have all manners of demands and insistences, but in my experience that doesn't have the vitality, isn't popular, and everyone's much more interested in having adult nuanced conversations, in finding multiple perspectives.
And I think largely I'm only semi interested in what Bluesky / atproto is today. I deeply enjoy connecting with amazing people, building incredible open data connected experiences. But I'm so keenly interested in anything that opens the door to enabling grass roots bottom up new social networking systems to spawn and grow and expand. I think most atproto fans would say similar, and I've heard the Bluesky devs themselves say, this protocol is just one go at trying to open the door to giving humanity its own chance outside big tech at building connected social systems.
you're thinking of the programs in low-level langs that survived their higher-level-lang competitors; if you plot the programs on your machine by age, how does the low quartile compare on reliability between programs written in each group
I'm not sure these problems are solvable once a company gets big enough and incentives completely take over. It's like the hands are trying to sew a parachute while the legs are sprinting towards a cliff.
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