cgNAT Blues
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I'm a bit bummed out this morning.

For a while I've been entertaining the notion of hosting the LL using
my own hardware.  Currently I rent a VPS on an insanely cheap
plan. (This seems to no longer be offered by the hosting provider but
they still seem happy enough to keep me on for now.)  While a VPS
comes with some advantages over local hosting - the principal one for
me being the ability to run my own SMTP server (outright impossible
from residential IPs) - the ongoing costs (even the tiny amount I pay)
and having to rely on somebody else for such a basic service leave me
vaguely unsatisfied.

But now I discover I'm stuck behind cgNAT and thus that there's
little hope.

It's very tempting to interpret this situation as intentionally evil
corporations enforcing the consumer/producer binary view of the
population. Late capitalism and all that.  After all, these technical
challenges could have been solved decades ago had we managed to
properly transition to IPv6.

The real explanation is probably more practical and boring, but no
less depressing: almost nobody cares about self-hosting or direct
peer-to-peer communication, and those that do are willing to pay extra
for it. ISPs have just stopped providing a service which nobody was
using anyway.

We didn't use it, so we lost it.
.