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I'm not sure it's the sunk cost of IPv4 addresses that's causing this. My guess would be that the "support IPv6" JIRA ticket gets perpetually thrown into the backlog because it won't get any new customers to sign up, so it's clearly not important from a "ship MVP" perspective.

Stack overflow's reply to "why do you not support ipv4" is more or less what you describe:

> It's just a lot of work for honestly not a lot of gain just yet. Things like HTTPS and HTTP/2 are far more impactful for users. We'll get to IPv6 eventually, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon. There are simply far more impactful things we can do with our time on the sysadmin front for the foreseeable future.

> This is something everyone on our SRE team would like to do. We just don't have the time yet, even more important things are in queue.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/348224

Other services sit on giant heaps of ipv4 space and see it appreciate. For them, price increases are wonderful, because it means they can charge higher rents for the ipv4 space.

Stackoverflow's quote you pasted makes me feel like an old fart on the Internet. I imagine there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses at play here, but I kind of remember an Internet when we would do things for the good of the network as well as for the good of the user.

Taking action as a group to speed adoption of a technology that makes the kind of innovation and autonomy we had in the first thirty years of the Internet accessible to the next thirty years of the Internet is impactful for users. The gigantic companies who have bought /8s and /9s of IPv4 space are not going to undermine their investments. It will take companies and network operators who are big enough to decide but small enough to still be idealistic who say "yes, IPv6 is worth it and we are going to spend the time and people and money and resources on doing it."

This is the same problem we have with housing; it can't be an investment and a thing everyone needs. At least the difference here is probably no one winds up hungry under a bridge taking ill-advised substances to handle daily life simply because they don't have a /24 to call their own.

Yeah, this development had advantages as well as disadvantages. I feel that websites of today have become easier to use for average non technical people for example than they were back in the day. This is what the greater user focus motivated by commercial interests brings you. On the other hand you see technical improvements being neglected like in this instance.

On the bright side, IPv6 adoption is increasing constantly, and if you fit the curves we'll have 100% adoption (or close) in the 2030s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28186709

> it's even more likely in other countries.

The US is ahead of most other countries with ipv6 adoption.

Here in Australia I email my ISP once a year or so asking about ipv6 support. They have "no plans at this stage". And have had no plans for years.

You can see the per-country IPv6 support here:

https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6

Apparently here in Australia (like much of the rest of the world) we still only have ~25% of our population on ipv6 networks. Africa is almost entirely dark.

Weirdly India is the world leader here, with 73% of devices being ipv6 capable.

Which ISP are you with, out of curiosity?

India's IPv6 penetration is largely due to Jio, which has ~500mn customers! [1] and for the most part gives subscribes IPv6 addresses.

1: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/reliance-jio-adds-5-47...

Yearly reminder than HN is still IPv4-only.

OrgPad.com went to Hetzner from DigitalOcean because of this. We saved some money and actually get a comparable quality with IPv6. That is not bad at all. Of course, Hetzner don't have such nice graphs for the VPS, there aren't many features like managed databases etc. that DO has, but we don't need that since we manage on our own (which is also one of the reasons we get better performance for less money). IPv6 at DO is really more for ticking a box instead of real production use. E.g. DO Spaces don't support IPv6. You can't run SMTP on IPv6, because DO uses somewhat non-standard /124 for a droplet and you can't have a IPv6 floating prefix/ IP.

> The reality is, pretty much anyone who uses a major ISP in the US has IPv6 (Comcast, Spectrum, etc. hand them out without customers even asking), and it's even more likely in other countries.

But Verizon FIOS does not, long after they should have.

> The reality is, pretty much anyone who uses a major ISP in the US has IPv6 (Comcast, Spectrum, etc. hand them out without customers even asking), and it's even more likely in other countries.

Unfortunately, there are still major ISPs in the US that don’t support IPv6. For example, Verizon (not Verizon Wireless) has been promising IPv6 for about a decade and has so far failed to deliver.

I'm from Quebec in Canada, the 2 majors ISP (Vidéotron and Bell), don't support IPV6. I don't know for others provinces, as they all have their own IPS (Bell is in a few of them to my knowledge, Vidéotron doesn't).

Somehow, `dig fly.io` gives me IPv4, where `dig fly.io AAAA` gives me IPv6. What's the difference here?

One possibility: You might be getting that AAAA from a v4 DNS server (or resolver/cache), whereas `dig -6 fly.io` attempts the query over v6. For example, try `dig -4 fly.io AAAA` ("use a v4 DNS server address from /etc/resolv.conf to get the v6 (AAAA) record") versus `dig -6 fly.io` ("use a v6 DNS server from /etc/resolv.conf to get the address") - the latter may not work if you don't have IPv6 set up on your local network. Basically, your /etc/resolv.conf on your computer (or home router) is pointing at an IPv4 address for a DNS server, so that DNS server/resolver is probably defaulting to giving you a v4 record back.

Your browser, however, may also be circumventing all of this and may be using DoH to a public DNS server, and therefore may have a completely different DNS querying experience than what you're seeing with dig...so you should also take a look at what your browser's network inspector tells you about the host you're getting the fly.io content from.

I wonder if there's a good service for testing the IPv6 readiness of a website. Something like SSL Labs or Mozilla Observatory, but for IPv6 on the server side.

The reason simply is that when no type is specified, `dig` performs a lookup for an A record (i.e. IPv4 address). When you manually specify AAAA, it does AAAA lookup, which returns IPv6 address. (details in `man dig`)