Roses are red, violets are blue, everyone is using IPv6, why aren't you?

Working in computing for years and this is what I've heard

2000: IPv4 is about to dry up, we really need to start moving to v6!

2005: OH NO THE SKY IS FALLING IPv4 IS ALMOST GONE! IPv6 IN THE NEXT YEAR OR TWO OR THE INTERNET WILL DIE!

2010: WE'RE SERIOUS THIS TIME IPv6 NEEDS TO BE A THING RIGHT NOW! HELP!

2015: Yeah, okay, NAT has served us well so far, but we can only take it so far, we really need v6 to be the standard in the next 5-10 years or we're in trouble!

2020: Um... guys? IPv6? Hello? Anyone? crickets

2024: IPv6ers are now the vegans of networking

this may or may not be satire, just laugh if unsure

As a networker, ipv6 is the future. I'm a fan of it, but I don't really talk about it anymore because there's no point.

I threw in the towel after an ISP messed up so badly that I just couldn't bother anymore.

At a previous job a client I was doing some work for got a new internet connection at a new site, the ISP ran brand new fiber for it. This wasn't a new building or anything, but the fiber was new. They allocated them a static IPv4 thing as usual, and I asked the tech about V6, and they said we would have to take it up with the planning team, so I did. I was involved in the email chain at the end of the sales process to coordinate the hookup. So I asked. After many emails back and forth, I was informed the connection was allocated.

They allocated one single IPv6 subnet directly off of their device. I couldn't even.

For those that don't understand, the firewall we had connected to the device is an ipv6 router. What normally happens, especially in DHCP customer connections, is that the router will use DHCP-PD to allocate a subnet for the router to use on the LAN, and automatically set up a route to say "reach this subnet we allocated for this router, via this router" kind of thing. I'm dramatically simplifying, but that's the gist. In DHCP-PD, the router will also have an IPv6 address on the ISP-facing link to facilitate the connection. In the case of the earlier story, they gave us an entire subnet to communicate between the ISP and the router, and didn't give us a subnet for the client systems inside the network.

I did ask about this and I can only describe their reply as "visible confusion".

I know many who will still be confused by this point are people who have not used IPv6; to explain further: the IP on your local (LAN) systems needs to be a public IP address, because the router no longer does network address translation when sending your data to the internet. So the IP on the router has no bearing on your computer having a connection to the internet over v6. If your local computer does not have a globally unique ipv6 address, you cannot use IPv6. There are ways around this, NAT66 exists but it's incredibly bad practice in most cases. The firewall I was working with didn't really support NAT66 (at least, at the time) and I wasn't really going to set that up.

ISPs are the reason I gave up on IPv6.

I'll add this other story to reinforce it. I'll keep it brief. A different ISP for a different company at a different site entirely. The client purchased a static IPv4 address, and I asked about IPv6, as you do. To preface, I know this company and used them for my own connection at the time. They have IPv6 for residential clients via DHCP-PD. I was told, no joke, that because of the static IPv4 assignment, and how they execute that for businesses, that they couldn't add IPv6 to the connection, at all.

The last thing I want to mention is a video I saw, which is aptly named "CGN, a driver for IPv6 adoption" or something similar. It's a short lecture about the evils of carrier grade NAT, and how IPv6 actually fixes pretty much all the bs that goes with CGN, with fewer requirements and less overhead.

IPv6 is coming. You will prefer IPv4 until you understand how horrific CGN is.
- Yep. It was mostly a joke. Mostly. The bungled adoption of v6 plus all the ways we can still leverage v4 is what's keeping v6 from being adopted any time soon, but one day we're going to have to rip off the band-aid and just go for it. Sure, v6 is going to bring its own issues and weirdness, but FUTURE!
- I gave it the old college try about 6 months ago. Found out how to send the req for a subnet to my ISP. Configured my opnsense. When it worked, it worked. But it would randomly stop routing regularly. After a lot of troubleshooting determined it was the isp and have up.
  
  Maybe I'll try again in another 6 months.
- CGnat is an abomination.
- Thanks for the comment. Kinda confirms my approach (mostly out of laziness) of "I'll do it when the ISP starts pushing it" is the correct one.
  
  I think tech advocacy generally doesn't work, and in the case of IPv6 I can't see it working at all unless they can convince the ISPs to devote a lot more resources to it. But since I'm not an ISP... meh, whatever I guess.
- At least you can talk to someone at your ISP who can change things, in 10 years I was literally never been able to contact someone who knows anything about networks in any of the 3 big ISPs here.. all I get is this:
  
  "oh you have speed issue? Let me "refresh" your connection"
  
  "No sir i have no speed issues, I just need to be able to open IPv6 ports"
  
  "Oh trying to changing the cable port?"
  
  "Sigh.. can you transfer me to advanced support plz"
  
  "Sure thing"
  
  Advanced support: "So you having speed issues?"
  
  "No i just need to be able to open IPv6 ports"
  
  "Ah ports, you can do that from your router settings i think"
  
  "No sir, you are the only ISP here where I can't open ports or receive any ICMP on my ipv6"
  
  "Let me see.. i'll refresh your connections"
  
  And it's the same of many different issues, you can't get a hold of anyone who can change anything in any layer about any config. Take it or leave it..
But new IPv4 allocations have run out. I've seen ISPs that won the lottery in the 90s/2000s (when the various agencies controlling IP allocations just tossed them around like they were nothing) selling large blocks for big money.

Many ISPs offer only CGNAT, require signing up to the higher speed/more expensive packages to get a real IP, or charge extra on top of the standard package for one. I fully expect this trend to continue.

The non-move to IPv6 is laziness, incompetence, or the sheer fact they can monetize the finite resource of IPv4 addresses and pass the costs onto the consumer. I wonder which it is.
- Oooh is that why ipv6 adoption is so regional ( Based on https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ) . Like france ,germany or india having more than 70 % while italy or poland hanging below 20% ? Also judging from this site it seems like ipv6 is actually getting adopted at quite the rapid pace. Even if some regions are faring way worse than the others.
- Apparently it's still cheaper to buy IPV4 blocks than to upgrade all the equipment and IT staff to use 6.
- I mean, at least over here, a white IP has been a paid service for as long as I can remember. Absolute majority of people don't need a static IP, which is why we haven't had internet "breaking" because of IPv4 running out.
- a combination of all of these, most likely
IPv4 dried up a long time ago. But it's different for every country. Countries like US and UK simply took over large blocks of IPv4 addresses and countries like Brazil got fucked. So, if you're in a country with a large pool, you won't notice any issues today, but if you're not so lucky, a lot of internet services are not accessible to you because some dickhead got IP banned and that IP is shared by thousands if not millions of users in your country.
The adoption of IPv6 on some segments of the Internet has lessened the crisis around IPv4 availability.
Imho

Ipv4 and peak oil are similar.

We're constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.

Someone sells of their underused block, or more people move to the services with excess IP addresses if they need one.
- We're constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.
  
  It's a supply and demand situation. We run out of things not only when they are physically exhausted, but also when it's not economically viable to find ways to make more. But when demand increases enough, it will eventually become economically viable again.
- We’re constantly running out; but every fes years
  
  critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It's gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing, due to the price increase of oil. Likewise, our oil consumption has gone down, and our ability to extract it HAS gone up, just not all that much. The big difference is that there's just more oil that we know about now, than there used to be.
  
  IPV4 addresses are a static pool, that never changes, the only thing that changes is the adoption of them, as certain things move to IPV6 they're still likely to hold IPV4 in some capacity, as IPV6 isn't fully rolled out almost anywhere.
Who needs an IP address anymore? What year is it? You want to connect to your friend's computer and exchange some information via computer system, seriously? Just use Cloudflare, Google or Azure and route everything through them.
- You... do know how computers connect to each other, right? I hope this is sarcasm. But these days unless it's specifically stated, it's usually not, just a bunch of dumb kids who can't understand how the internet works.
  
  And then the dumb kid realizes he's dumb and says "uh yeah, sarcasm, duh, didn't you know i was joking, hahahahaha, yep, I knew, of course I did!" when he totally didn't.
  
  But regardless of the fucking point, no one wants to use these big business trash that is ruining the internet.
it's y2k, but not 2k, it's just y.

The perpetual chicken egg problem of IPv6: many users don't have IPv6 because it's not worth it because everything is reachable via IPv4 anyways because IPv6 only service don't make sense because they will only reach a subset of users because many users don't have IPv6.....

Yes but IPv4 is becoming expensive and it's annoying having to use a middleman to clone github repos on a v6-only VPS

IPv6 is not hard, there is no excuse not to have it
- I mean, yes and no. For an individual or individual systems? No, it's not hard. But I used to oversee a WAN with multiple large sites each with their own complex border, core, and campus plant infrastructure. When you have an environment like that with complex peerings, and onsite and cloud networks it's a bit trickier to introduce dual stack addressing down to the edge. You need a bunch of additional tooling to extend your BGP monitoring, ability to track asynchronous route issues, add route advertisements etc. when you have a large production network to avoid breaking, it's more of a nail biter, because it's not like we have a dev network that is a 1-1 of our physical environment. We have lab equipment, and a virtual implementation of our prod network, but you can only simulate so much.
  
  That being said, we did implement it before most of the rest of the world, in part because I wanted to sell most of our very large IPv4 networks while prices are rising. But it was a real engineering challenge and I was lucky to have the team and resources and time to get it done when it wasn't driving an urgent, short timeline need.
Honestly this isn't even true anymore. Most major ISPs have implemented dual stack now. The customer doesn't know or care because it's done at the CPE for them.

I use a browser extension which tells me if the site I'm at is 6 or 4 or mixed. In 2024 most major sites support V6. A lot of this is due to CDN supporting it natively.

The fact that GitHub doesn't is quickly becoming the exception.
- May I ask which extension you are using?
- IPv6 traffic is globally steady at around 37%. So it isn't a majority by far.
If IPv6 is done right you don't even know you have it. If you use a cell phone or a home Internet, there is a high chance you are already using IPv6.
- If your ISP supports it
This sums it up. I'm too lazy and there's too little incentive.
I don't have IPv6, but I can still reach IPv6 only sites if I use MullvadVPN (and probably also with other VPN providers).

I’m not using it because by and large it’s not implemented properly on consumer hardware, and my ISP doesn’t care if their IPv6 network is broken.

I've tried multiple times to go IP6 only. I mostly thought, despite my reasonable understanding of IP4, that I was the problem in trying to set it up. I found my dns host was being forgotten multiple times a day, set to something invalid, then it would time out and revert back to the working one. I couldn't figure out how to connect two computers together for Minecraft.

Now I hear it was just garbage consumer hardware and software? Fuck me. So much wasted time and effort to say nothing of believing I had turned into a tech idiot.
- You’re not an idiot. You’re using tools that don’t really do what they claim because it wasn’t considered an important use case.
  
  IPv6 is great, but we haven’t seen enough pain yet to really drive adoption on the home LAN.
  
  My solution uses the ISP box to deliver stateless auto conf, and bridging a consumer router. I can’t open ports but at least I get an IP.
That is not the case for every country though. In France and Germany for example almost 3/4 of google requests are via IPv6.
- https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
- That’s good to hear! Very encouraging!

"Everyone is using IPv6"

It's barely supported. Most providers here "offer IPv6", but each has a different gotcha to actually using it, if it works at all and they didn't just route you through hardware that doesn't know what it is.

What's “here”? Here in Germany, mine has it for maybe 10 years or so. Basically since launch day.

And new ISPs only have v6 since all legacy (v4) blocks have been sold years ago.
- Just because you have a IPv6 address doesn't mean you're actually using it. At best you're tunnelling IPv4 traffic through your carrier's IPv6 network. Current estimates (from Cloudflare) show only about 34% of the global internet uses IPv6.
  
  If you only used IPv6, you wouldn't be able to access nearly 66% of the internet.
- While you may have IPv6 it doesn’t do anything if the services you utilize don’t support it.
  
  MANY major websites and domains have no IPv6 support. https://whynoipv6.com/
- Mordor itself, Russia. Technically, most ISPs support IPv6 here but as I said each has something weird in config that makes using it... Fun. I don't remember specifics since I'm mostly looking at it from consumer side, but I could try finding the article (in russian) that talked about it.
  
  My current connection doesn't have IPv6 at all according to https://ipv6-test.com/, although I'm not 100% if it's because of provider or Cisco AnyConnect blocking shit.
  
  When you when you sign up for internet here, you get a dynamic IP, it's been that way for... As long as I can remember, really. Definitely more than ten years. I know in Moscow people used to get white IPs way back when, but that's long gone. Not really a problem since most people don't host anything.
- Not at all only. At times you have both IPv6 and IPv4 and other times you can still get IPv4 at no additional cost like when you run your own router or modem. The layperson will be given IPv6 by default, but it's not the only thing you can get.

Why should we care? So address space may run out eventually - that's our ISPs' problem.

Other than that I actually don't like every device to have a globally unique address - makes tracking even easier than fingerprinting.

That's also why my VPN provider recommends to disable IPv6 since they don't support it.

Because people in countries with ISPs that are unable to provide IPv4 (e.g. too expensive) can't access GitHub easily.
even easier then fingerprinting.

than*
- Auto-"correct". Thanks, fixed.
the only reason i can think of is cgnatting ipv4 because of depleted pool. otherwise yea.

i believe you can NAT ipv6 too, i mean so you use the router's address only?
- Yes you can.
- You'd better hope that you can NAT ipv6 because if you aren't behind a CGNAT and then your LAN is completely exposed without a NAT you're very likely going to have devices exploited.
  
  NATs on people's boundary has been doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting for everyone's security at home.
that’s our ISPs’ problem

If the Internet means for you a way to access Facebook, Netflix, Google and YouTube, yeah.
But if it means a network to send something to another computer then it's a huge problem.

Because ISP won't care if you can accept connections or not. They don't care about decentralization and being able to host stuff yourself. Most consumers just want a pipe to big services and not to their friend's house.
That's the dumbest thing I've read today... Your ISP is fleecing you and you're happy with it.
- What the fuck are you talking about? My ISP supports IPv6 just fine, but following my VPN's advice I disable it (on certain devices at least) for privacy concerns. And it makes exactly zero difference in functionality.

My ISP doesn't provide an IPv6 connection.

Mine provides a connection, but doesn’t expose ports on v6. So I can access v6 services but can’t self-host any.
- Huh? With IPv6 you get your own IP address, the ISP doesn't need to know shit about ports. Your address is not behind a NAT anymore, and ports don't need to be forwarded.
  
  Perhaps you mean the ISP set up a firewall that blocks incoming connections? In which case, maybe you can have that firewall disabled? ISP firewalls and "safe browsing" packages are always shit.
  
  To be honest though there might be some aspect to this I don't know.
Time to shift providers. Vote with your wallet
- Not always possible. In Spain IPv6 adoption is at like 5%. There's literally no ISP that offers it. I don't even know how that 5% got it, maybe special deals.
- You have more than one provider in your area?
- move providers? Where, to who? There is currently one provider where i live, soon potentially to be two. Though it's not finalized yet, nor constructed, so for all intents and purposes, it's just the one provider.
- As soon as fiber covers the final < 0.5% of my city with fiber (🤞 but I doubt it will happen) I'll switch off of cable. Until then I can use cable with one provider or DSL with another.

rose are red, violets are blue, money is the reason we can't have nice things.

Roses in summer, violets in spring, it’s trivially easy this rhyming thing
- shitposting properly is the objective, regardless of my rhyming imperative. My post must be shit, in order to get the hits.
- Roses are red, violets are blue, sod off.
- This is why I hated r/boottoobig

Just remember we got rid of TLS 1.0 the same thing can be done with IPv4. It's time for browser makers to put "deprecated technology" warnings on ipv4 sites.

IPv4 isn't depreciated, it's exhausted. It's still a key cornerstone of our current internet today.

We still have "modern" hardware being deployed with piss-poor IPv6 support (if any at all). Until that gets fixed, adoption rates will continue to be low. Adding warnings will only result in annoying people, not driving for improvement.
- Adding warnings will only result in annoying people, not driving for improvement.
  
  Given how poorly adoption has gone so far this might be the only way to get actual fast support rolled out. Piss people off, get change
- IPv4 isn’t depreciated, it’s exhausted.
  
  exhaustion probably also constitutes as "deprecated" once the utility of a system designed to be, well, useful no longer meets the usefulness quotient that it previously provided. Suddenly It's "deprecated technology"

I'll start using it after I migrate to Wayland.

How do you guys remember IPv6 addresses?

You shouldn't need to remember IP addresses, they invented DNS to solve that problem lol

Even so, the addresses can be even easier to remember because we get a-f as well as digits, my unique local subnet is fd13:dead:beef:1::/60 cause I like burgers haha
- You do need to know it when you're working with subnets and routing tables.
  
  Unless you have anything but a flat network structure with everything in one subnet, working with IPV6 is a giant PITA.
Assign a DNS name
- Is it possible to do that for router/access point running OpenWRT?
  
  I have to try it when I'll be back home.
  
  Edit: turns out that all devices connected to router are accessible from <hostname>.lan. I don't remember setting it up, tho.
- Even better, if that's not something available from outside, to just enable mDNS.
hosts.txt

dns, VPN setups. ETC we live in 2024, there are solutions to this problem.
Since I bought a domain name I do not remember IP addresses. Just like I don't remember password since I installed password manager or not remember phone numbers since I have a smartphone.

It's only annoying when being on someone's else computer without my clipboard sharing setup and need to copy an address by hand. But that's an issue when setting something up. I would take this inconvenience while setting up than all everyday inconveniences that IPv4 created in last years.
You can shorten them sometimes, the neatest trifk I saw was putting leetspeak words in the address.
- CAFE, BABE, BEEF, DEAD, and of course, 1337.

2 months ago I thought I'd start learning IPv6 and started watch some intro videos on YouTube.

Holy crap... It's a beast and it just felt like if you don't know what you're doing you might lose all control over your network. Ok. So a device didn't get a dhcp address? No problem... It creates it's open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own....

Normally that's not a problem since your normal home router wouldn't route 169.254.x.x.... But it just seems like there's A LOT to think about before activating IPv6 at home. I've got a Creality K1 Max... Fun thing: factory reset also creates a new MAC Address... So there's no way in hell thay I just let her lose by activating IPv6.

Ps. Yes, I most likely panic because I haven't figured out IPv6... But until I understand IPv6 there's just going to be IPv4.

Ok. So a device didn't get a dhcp address? No problem... It creates it's open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own....

Its not that different from a conceptual point of view. Your router is still the gate keeper.

Home router to ISP will usually use DHCPv6 to get a prefix. Sizes vary by ISP but its usually like a /64. This is done with Prefix Delegation.

Client to Home Router will use either SLACC, DHCPv6, or both.

SLACC uses ICMPv6 where the client asks for the prefix (Router Solicitation) and the router advertises the prefix (Router Advertisement) and the client picks an address in it. There is some duplication protection for clients picking the same IP, but its nothing you have to configure. Conceptually its not that different from DHCP Request/Offer. The clients cannot just get to the internet on their own.

SLACC doesn't support sending stuff like DNS servers. So DHCPv6 may still be used to get that information, but not an assigned IP.

Just DHCPv6 can also be used, but SLACC has the feature of being stateless. No leases or anything.

The only other nuance worth calling out is interfaces will pick a link local address so it can talk to the devices its directly connected to over layer 3 instead of just layer 2. This is no different than configuring 169.254.1.10/31 on one side and 169.254.1.11/31 on the other. These are not routed, its just for two connected devices to send packets to each other. This with Neighbor Discovery fills the role of ARP.

There is a whole bunch more to IPv6, but for a typical home network these analogies pretty much cover what you'd use.
- SLACC doesn't support sending stuff like DNS servers.
  
  It does
Generally, a device cannot get an internet facing IP address unless something else on your network is advertising the prefix. In fact, I'd argue there's little point using DHCPv6 now. Some devices are only interested in SLAAC. But, if you have a router that gets an IPv6 prefix from your ISP (usually /48 or /64, but you can get other sizes) it will usually then advertise that onto your local network.

As for the IP addresses. I would say that you should definitely still have a firewall in place. But the setup is the same as IPv4 just without NAT. e.g. you set a blanket rule for your prefix to allow outbound and block unrelated inbound. Then poke holes through for specific devices and services.

By default, IPv6 implementations make an assumption that they're not going to be a server (if you want a device to be a server, you can just set a static IP) and their "main" IP will be a random looking one (and the configuration will depend on whether it uses an interface identifier to create the address, or if it is random) within your (usually huge) allocation. But more than that, they will usually be configured to use the IPv6 privacy extensions (RFC4941). This generates extra temporary addresses per device, which are used for outbound connections and do not accept incoming connections. That is, people cannot see your IP address on their host from your connection and then port scan you, since no ports will respond. You could still have ports open on your "real" IP address. But, that one isn't ordinarily used for outgoing connections, so no-one will know it exists. To discover it they would need to scan your whole prefix (remember that the /64 allocation you will generally get is the internet * the internet in terms of address space, that is much harder to brute force scan).

I think the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 might seem scary, but most of them are actually improvements on what we had before, making use of the larger pools we have available. Once you work it out, it's really not so bad.

I would like to see routers setup to firewall ipv6 by default to give the same protection as NAT though, meaning users need to poke holes into the firewall for incoming connections. Maybe some do. I know mine did not and it was one of the first things I did.
- Didn't know about the outbound traffic thing, that's really cool.
Those are just the same networking concepts as v4. Just 128 bits instead of 32. The hard thing can be ULA or SLAAC, which are like "yeah, just some random address to not get conflicts" and "yeah, first half your ISP gives you, second is taken from MAC address".

We even get rid of a bunch loaded crap that holepunching v4 and making it work developed through years.

Maybe it seems hard, because what was used before was not really learned how it works but just relied on hacks.

I'm actually bit sad that I had to move onto a ISP which has zero IPv6 support, as I previously did have IPv6. The last thing I did on that connection was to debug the hell out of my IPv6 code I had developed.

I feel you, moved ISP maybe 3 months ago, only to find out I'm behind CGNAT and no IPv6..
- That should simply not be allowed. Cgnat for ipv4 is fine if they also provide proper ipv6

My isp does t even support ipv6

I just upgraded my Lemmy instance's hardware and finally got IPv6 support :D

Cause none of my choices of ISP supports it...

I’m not. I disable it on all Linux machines I manage. And we do not use it at work either.

This. And also disable https. Those things just break all the time.
- Not sure what you are going for here

I wish my ISP had ipv6 support to be honest

Last year my ISP forced v6 and disabled the option to set v4 only. I lost the Adgurd Home DNS configuration in all devices. But then learnt a few things and able to use internal ipv6 address for dns although still unable to configure ipv6 in Docker :/

People use IPv6?

I still don't know anything about it

Just under half of the Internet: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
You do as well, if you run any operating system newer then the last 10 years.
Same. I have disabled it on my devices since it mostly just causes problems.
- By disabling both v4 and v6 you can fix 100% of the problems.

whats the problem with IPv4?

IPv6 changed some things. First and foremost it has a huge address space:

IPv4: 4294967296 (2^32)

IPv6: 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (2^128)

Then they simplyfied some things:

Removed Broadcast in favor of Multicast and Anycast

Added autoconfiguration without a DHCP server

Better subnetting support

And much more
- They went just a teeny tiny little bit overboard with the address space. Ipv4 is four groups between 0 and 255, ipv6 is eight groups of four digit hex, 0000 to ffff - e.g the Google DNS ipv4 address is 8.8.8.8. the ipv6 one is 2001:4860:4860:0:0:0:0:8888 (thankfully at least some devices allow using :: to skip all the zeroes, so it's "just" 2001:4860:4860::8888)
  
  But we now have enough ipv6 addresses to give more than 10 billion ipv6 addresses to every single grain of sand on earth, and still have some left over.
- we already have enough IPv4 addresses thanks to stuff such as NAT and CG-NAT, these devices also protect the end-user by not directly exposing their IP to the internet
  
  what's the problem with broadcast? also afaik IPv4 also supports multicast
  
  what's the problem with IPv4 subnetting?
Their ranges are running dry. Nearly all address spaces are taken, so we will need to migrate eventually. However, since almost everyone still supports both, and ipv4 is much easier to read and maintain, adoption of IPv6 has been slow.
Imagine getting out of phone numbers, so the solutions is for everyone to call the last remaining people with public/routable numbers 24/7 so those people would redirect messages to others.

With Internet, users does not see that easly, but if you host anything for others it's getting harder and harder to accept incoming connections without many layers of hacks to bypass hacks that ISPs do to keep IPv4 network working.
IPV4 has a static ceiling for how many addresses can exist. We're concerningly close to that ceiling already. If we were to run out, internet suddenly becomes a fucking nightmare.

I'm using ipv6 when I occasionally connect to Yggdrasil.

And I think I'll use ipv6 if we ever need to build a new earthnet.

It's a fine technology.

What do you do on the yggdrasil network?
- Google some sites, visit some empty IRC channels, dream of the future for a bit, then turn it off

I use IPv6 at home, I selected my last few ISP's because they had IPv6. Left one ISP when they removed IPv6 🤦‍♂️ .

If you can choose ISP choose one that offers IPv6 and let them know why.

Because I can remember an IPv4 address and not a V6 address!

At least they could have added an extra octet to v4 instead of making it garbyremoved looking

You are not expected to remember a v6 address - or even v4 for that matter. They are designed for machines. DNS is designed for humans.
- This is a good (and fair) point.
  
  However they still look ugly and scary and intimidating :)

Interesting, github websites/pages support ipv6

github.com doesn't have a AAAA DNS entry. So it's not serving anything directly over IPv6. Likewise, ping -6 github.com fails. So, what are you seeing that is supporting ipv6?
- Websites hosted by github pages, like https://2009scape.org or https://pytorch.github.io

I would like to use IPv6 but google and MS are having a dick waving contest with competing implementations, as I understand it. So fuck it.

Retardistan is hogging the biggest portion of the IPv4 addresses for themselves. That's why they have the worst IPv6 support. The need arose last in this part of the world.

Roses are red, violets are blue, everyone is using IPv6, why aren’t you?

Roses are red, violets are blue, IPv6 costs extra, and that just won’t do

As far as I can tell it's the other ways around: IPv4 is getting more costly

Example: AWS started to charge for IPv4 addresses a few months ago - a IPv4 address now costs around $3.6 per month
- Might just be my host. Maybe I need to find another one
"everyone", tell that literally to every isp my country that doesn't even provide ipv6 support.
In the USA they charge extra for IPv6? I'm in the UK and while there are some ISPs that don't provide IPv6 at all, and some that do shitty things like dynamic prefixes on IPv6, I've not seen anyone charging for it.

Likewise, server providers generally don't charge for it. In fact, they will often charge less if you don't need IPv4.
- No don’t take shitposts literally. I’ve been using ipv6 for a decade at home now in the USA and I don’t pay extra for it ever. Also why are you assuming this post refers to the us?
Meanwhile me who needs to pay 97 EUR / year for two V4 to V6 proxies so people not having (or disabling, ugh) V6 can connect to my stuff.

Actually those proxies are still cheaper than renting v4 address space for all my servers.