[radiojosh]

This is a terribly uninformed take.

ISPs charge for public IP addresses. Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your house? Because that's what you get when you don't use NAT. And if it weren't for NAT, the Internet would be running out of IPv4 addresses (it already is, sort of), so you'd either deal with much higher prices for IPv4 addresses, or you'd have to learn IPv6, which is WAY harder than dealing with port forwarding through an IPv4 NAT.

Not to mention the premium you'd pay for a router with an actual firewall, and you had better make sure you understand the firewall. Port forwarding on a working router is generally a lot easier than a firewall.

If it was really impossible to set up inbound connections to your server, it was either a problem with the router or a problem with your ISP.

[skrebbel]

Arguably if people had somehow rejected NAT more violently, IPv6 might’ve been popular much sooner cause you gotta solve the “woops there are now more devices than addresses” problem somehow.

For the sake of running a home server from a network not behind a NAT router, you don’t need to understand much more about IPv6 than how to copy&paste an address.

[fragmede]

The fact that my laptop right now has 10 different ipv6 addresses assigned to it when my ISP doesn't even support ipv6, (and two ipv4 addresses) says users need to understand more than copy and paste.

[jeroenhd]

> ISPs charge for public IP addresses

Because NAT allows them to.

> Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your house?

Yes.

> or you'd have to learn IPv6, which is WAY harder than dealing with port forwarding through an IPv4 NAT.

Back in 2005, maybe. Now, it works out of the box, either through SLAAC or DHCPv6.

> Not to mention the premium you'd pay for a router with an actual firewall

In 2005, maybe. Today, $10 routers off AliExpress have a firewall, probably set to "deny incoming" by default.

> Port forwarding on a working router is generally a lot easier than a firewall.

I know for a fact that the routers of at least two ISPs use the exact same page for port forwarding and the firewall. You don't enter iptables commands, you specify a list of ports that you want to be open for a specific address, except now you don't need to differentiate between "source port" and "destination port".

[epcoa]

>> ISPs charge for public IP addresses

> Because NAT allows them to.

NAT increases the available supply of IPv4 addresses, it makes them cheaper.

>> Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your house?

> Yes.

You can actually just go out and buy a block of IPv4. https://auctions.ipv4.global/