Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT

I'm still not convinced that IPv6 is a good thing. I think that we should have doubled down on sharing IP addresses. Both for consumbers (NAT) and for servers (NAT, TLS/HTTP reverse-proxying). It just solves all problems with IP address exhaustion. And the fact that consumers can't just directly connect to each other is a feature.

I remember times before NAT and SSL

You could share things easily, sure, but anyone could get hacked pretty easily and very targetted.

After NAT, sharing was still easy lots of 'piracy' apps, various messengers with NAT passthrough

Both before and after you needed to be technical, you can't ask someone that doesnt know about computers to set up an FTP server, and if they did it would be a nightmare and they'd likely share their whole drive

Same goes for anything else.

Anyway, we'll get the whole non-nat with IPv6, let's see what that brings

Time to set up IPV6.

NAT made distinction between PCs and servers too broad.

Related comment from another thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49454785

> Even more ironic is that NAT got normalized as a security feature — “your devices are hidden!” — which is one of the things that made people resist the thing that would fix it.

That tracks. I briefly looked into the Tailscale website and I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe it's not a NAT/ddns toolchain, maybe it's something more complex that I'm too dumb to understand. But if my thesis that it's NATware is right, it makes sense to market it as a security product, it fooled me for one, but it also passes as a quality product for an organization, and they feel they are getting a security product when they are actually signing the purchase request of a developer that is applying networking techniques they learned from managing a videogame server.