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you've /never/ heard anyone call ipv6 long, confusing, and complicated? I've basically /only/ heard people say that.

This is probably because the idealized world of "only network engineers" is leaky. Programmers, sysadmins, people trying to get their network printer to work, non-specialists have to interface with network addresses constantly.

Saying they shouldn't is not a description of reality. Not everyone who needs to set up or diagnose a network do so as a career path.

Almost all hardware and software has supported ipv6 for many many years. The humans using it are the ones that shut it off or disable it. Unless you address the human behavior of why that is, this problem will not be addressed.

I claim there needs to be a friendlier, casual interface that makes people's lives easier. It can be a crude kneecapped sheen so long as it addresses the needs of the general user. Then they'll use ipv6, not for ideology or virtue reasons about the commons but because it makes their lives easier



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I've almost never heard anyone in the general population use ip addresses, with the notable exception of gamers, but that's fading away too now that all major games come with friends, parties and deep linking support

I don't really understand the use case for typing up addresses either, copy pasting is going to be more precise, and if one can't read 8 quartet of letters one shouldn't be near networking equipment either.

Heck ibans are about as complex and the general population is coping just fine


right, but this isn't theoretical. ipv6 was finalized 25 years ago and global adoption is around 1/3. There's something seriously wrong and it's not that 2/3s of the world are using Windows Me and 20+ year old devices that don't support it.

It's human and behavior driven and addressing that is a matter of packaging, process, promotion, product, presentation... all those marketing ps.


Nitpicking, but it looks closer to 1/2: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Also it's increasing at ~5% a year, so in 12 years it'll be at ~104%.


Interesting. I guess it depends on how it's measured. I had just searched "adoption rates" and saw it said 1/3.

China is a laggard again here. I earlier saw that they were the largest windows xp holdout left. Sure it's only. 0.5% but many places are down to 0.1.


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