this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
236 points (90.1% liked)

Selfhosted

46671 readers
343 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
236
ISPs seem designed to funnel people to capitalist cloud services (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by ellie@slrpnk.net to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
76 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

(Sorry if this is too off-topic:) ISPs seem designed to funnel people to capitalist cloud services, or at least I feel like that. And it endlessly frustrates me.

The reason is even though IPv6 addresses are widely available (unlike IPv4), most ISPs won't allow consumers to request a static rather than a dynamic IPv6 prefix along with a couple of IPv6 reverse DNS entries.

Instead, this functionality is gatekept behind expensive premium or even business contracts, in many cases even requiring legal paperwork proving you have a registered business, so that the common user is completely unable to self-host e.g. a fully functional IPv6-only mail server with reverse DNS, even if they wanted to.

The common workaround is to suck up to the cloud, and rent a VPS, or some other foreign controlled machine that can be easily intercepted and messed with, and where the service can be surveilled better by big money.

I'm posting this since I hope more people will realize that this is going on, and both complain to their ISPs, but most notably to regulatory bodies and to generally spread the word. If we want true digital autonomy to be more common, I feel like this needs to be fixed for consumer landline contracts.

Or did I miss something that makes this make sense outside of a big money capitalist angle?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It'll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.

That is NAT, yes. But that is only one small function that a router can perform, and not all routers have NAT enabled. You only need NAT if your ISP only allows you to use a single IP address.

If your computer has an address that starts with 169, 168, or 10 there is a NAT somewhere in your network.

That's not actually true. I can create such a network without connecting it to the internet, no NAT. I can create a second network, again, no NAT. I can then use a gateway router that allows any node on the first network to reach any node on the second. That router is still not doing any NAT. It's just passing traffic between two networks.

[–] Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah you're right, I was simplifying to the point where I was a little mistaken. I was assuming y5ou're network was connected to the Internet and was just a standard residential setup, but this is a much better explanation.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 points 1 week ago

was just a standard residential setup,

The distinction is important because we are discussing IPv6. A "standard residential setup" with IPv6 would provide the user with an entire subnet rather than a single IP address. We still need a router to pass traffic from the ISP's network to our own network, but we no longer need NAT.