💾 Archived View for thelambdalab.xyz › phlog › 2024-06-16-cgNAT-blues.txt captured on 2024-07-08 at 23:26:22.
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-06-16)
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cgNAT Blues ----------- I'm a bit bummed out this morning. For a while I've been entertaining the notion of hosting the LL using my own hardware. Currently I rent a VPS on an insanely cheap plan. (This seems to no longer be offered by the hosting provider but they still seem happy enough to keep me on for now.) While a VPS comes with some advantages over local hosting - the principal one for me being the ability to run my own SMTP server (outright impossible from residential IPs) - the ongoing costs (even the tiny amount I pay) and having to rely on somebody else for such a basic service leave me vaguely unsatisfied. But now I discover I'm stuck behind cgNAT and thus that there's little hope. It's very tempting to interpret this situation as intentionally evil corporations enforcing the consumer/producer binary view of the population. Late capitalism and all that. After all, these technical challenges could have been solved decades ago had we managed to properly transition to IPv6. The real explanation is probably more practical and boring, but no less depressing: almost nobody cares about self-hosting or direct peer-to-peer communication, and those that do are willing to pay extra for it. ISPs have just stopped providing a service which nobody was using anyway. We didn't use it, so we lost it.