(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?

  • @dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
    99•19 days ago

    If you’re looking for sympathy, you got it. Fuck the state.

    If you’re looking for solutions, use a cheap $5/mo VPS that exists purely as your gateway host. Run everything you want on your home machines, then tunnel the traffic to your gateway and reverse-proxy it there. Your data stays in your hands, you can spin up and expose new services publicly in a matter of minutes, AND your home IP isn’t vulnerable to doxxing or DoS.

      • @Zetta@mander.xyzEnglish
        8•18 days ago

        “JUST $10.28/YEAR - WOW!!” Laughed out loud at that, and I’ll have to give this a look. Currently I just use nginx and duckdns to expose my home IP for my self hosted stuff.

      • youmaynotknowEnglish
        1•19 days ago

        Didn’t dig in too far into the options, but those prices are crazy low. Thanks for pointing us there.

    • @yonder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      10•19 days ago

      I basically do exactly this, but I am running the reverse proxy on my home computer: the VPS is literally just acting as a proxy, for which I use wireguard to tunnel the connection. So far it’s worked great, though initial setup was a pain.

      • @dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6•19 days ago

        This is a great suggestion!

        Lest anyone miss the buried lede, this approach means that traffic is pre-encrypted as it passes through the gateway VPS - so even if your VPS gets hacked, it’s way harder to steal credentials and break into the services running on your home network.

    • rezzEnglish
      9•19 days ago

      Is there a more detailed guide to this practice and the pros/cons?

      • EllieOPEnglish
        1•1 day ago

        While I agree on a practical level, and pragmatism sure is important, long term it still makes you pay into cloud services and gives cloud companies an easy way to directly man-in-the-middle your traffic. So I’m hoping one day the situation will improve.

          • EllieOPEnglish
            1•1 day ago

            The alternative is to get your ISP to offer you a static IPv6 and a reverse DNS PTR entry for your IPv6, like I asked for in the initial post. Some ISPs do if you offer them more money, some only do if you offer them more money and a legit business registration, apparently a few rare ones do it for free, and some never do it.

            Once you got the static IP, you can point DNS directly to yourself, and there’s no VPS or anything in between. Browser traffic and so on directly comes to your machine.