I see that lemmy.ml is the only major instance currently reachable over IPv6. When will lemmy.world join the modern internet?
In general, you should probably turn on your router’s NAT even for IPv6. What you mentioned is a security concern, and while yes, the IPv6 address space is enormous and finding a valid address is hard, if somebody already knows your IPv6 address it’s a lot easier. For a home user there isn’t really a reason for your ports to be accessible from the outside, and if you need such a thing, you can easily port forward specific ports.
edit: To add to that, turning on your router’s NAT isn’t a problem, you can always port forward, the problem with IPv4 is that you’re behind two NATs, your router’s and your ISP’s. Because of this, you can’t actually open up any port to be publicly visible on the Internet, which is extremely frustrating.
edit edit: Reply to my comment pointed out that what I suggest is retarded.
In general, you should probably turn on your router’s NAT even for IPv6.
No, you should not! NAT is not needed with IPv6 and you should never use it unless you really know what you are doing.
NAT is not a security feature, firewalls are, the default firewall rules from consumer routers are generally enough (allow outgoing, deny incoming except if it’s an existing connection). And if you’re concerned about others tracking hosts inside your network, the default settings of Privacy Extensions makes your device assign itself different IPs for outgoing connections every so often.
Coming from the land of IPV4 networks I struggle so much to wrap my head around this, do you have any suggestions for good resources to learn about it?
Learn about which part specifically? I’d argue that IPv6 is essentially IPv4 with reduced complexity (due to stuff like NAT no longer being necessary since address space is large enough). The basics of how smaller connected IPv4 networks work pretty much extends to how IPv6 works across the internet with a few differences such as link-local addresses which are only valid in the same network.
If you mean Privacy Extensions, that’s part of SLAAC, which is a way of how devices in a network can get an IP address (the other being DHCPv6, which afaik works pretty much like DHCP in IPv4). Here, the router only announces the local network prefix and hosts assign IP addresses themselves, instead of the router assigning an address to each host. This works due to networks usually being a /64 block which is a large enough address space for IP collisions to be very unlikely (and in case they happen, the colliding hosts can resolve that automatically).
That’s as far as my understanding goes anyway, I’m far from an expert, just someone who has set up a Linux home router from scratch so I’ve had to deal with this stuff :P
