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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

I accidentally became the user of an IPv6-only device a while back for some obscure reason I never could figure out. Let me tell you: There are no IPv6-only users. Absolutely nothing except Google, Facebook, and YouTube works. Any website not in the top 20 are IPv4-only. It was so bad I briefly thought I didn't have an internet connection at all. Anyone stuck on an IPv6-only connection would immediately cancel their contract on the grounds that they don't have de-facto internet access.

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So, like, the three most popular things still worked. I wonder if working more is related to their popularity.

I think it's more that Google and Meta have the surplus engineering resources to implement IPv6 for what is essentially no reason.

Probably for lower latency and higher reliability on mobile networks.

I've heard plenty of accounts from people (and these were techy people even, not just the ones who only go to Facebook and think that's the Internet) who lost v4 and didn't even realize for days, so I'm not sure how true that is... but more to the point, when we say an ISP is v6-only it usually implies some form of backwards compatibility method for reaching v4 hosts over the v6-only service.

Commonly that's NAT64, which maps v4 into the v6 address space. The resulting service is v6-only (you only get a v6 address and have to talk v6 to the ISP) but you can reach v4 servers by talking to the v6 addresses to which they've been mapped.

You can do IPv6 only if you have a 64 nat on your edge and use dns64 and just use a limited set of applications and devices.

Some applications will still fail to work though unless you also have 46 nat on your device which still doesn’t work transparently on majority of types of device.

You also need all devices on your lan to support v6 natively, and v6 only. From your printer to your speaker.

You might be able to do something with mdns and nat64 to get them working on an IPv4 only subnet. But you’re talking layers and layers of complexity for things which just have to work.

I’m posting this from my phone on my IPv6 only subnet, not sure if it’s using a 64 gateway or 6 native to HN, but it’s possible.

All the more reason to support it. There are lots of ISPs that only assign you an IPv6, and do hacky trickery to make IPv4 work over that. We wouldn’t need all of this.

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