Only network engineers should see or care about IP addresses. The fact IPv6 addresses use colons is why people don't use IPv6 is the worst take I've ever heard.
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
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.
I don't know a single gamer who rented a domain for private use. In fact, I would argue than the hassle of setting one up is the reason why Hamachi got popular back then. You don't have to bother with knowing any technical stuff, just download a software, share a code and play.
DynDNS was big among some of my gaming friends way back in the 90s at one point, when it was a free, donation-supported tool. It was quite useful and relatively low hassle.
At the time it provided a real simple desktop tool that you would install, sign in to your account name, and it would auto-update a (very) short TTL DNS A record for you. (Generally in the form of username.dyndns.org, but as I recall donators could also bring their own top level domain.)
We've got mDNS today to fill some of that gap, but I still wonder if it would also still be nice to have a "no click" desktop tool in 2023 that could quickly update very short TTL DNS AAAA records for you on a subdomain of your choice, and sort of lament Dyn's many pivots (and eventual Oracle buy out) because that original idea still has legs even if it didn't survive the 90s. (Though maybe this time as a true non-profit internet service or operating system feature.)
Hamachi was popular back in the day because it meant you didn’t need to forward ports on your router. (Something that still confuses some of my friends).
But only network engineers pick the protocols used. You’re making life harder for the very people who should be your primary audience.
PS: As a developer, I often read logs and go ”oh yeah, that’s just our satellite office IP”. 192.168.1.110 is the network printer, etc. There’s no hope of recognizing IPv6 addresses at a glance the same way.
There's more hope than you think as a developer to recognize those types of IPv6 addresses at a glance. The :: shortcut alone also acts a shortcut for pattern matching. You may have network designs where things like {prefix}::110 is the network printer and {prefix}::beef is the cafeteria's new meat printer. Whether or not you bother to remember what exactly {prefix} is or if in worst case it changes regularly and you can mostly ignore it (after briefly pattern matching that it looks close enough to other IPs in your network).
There's different "rules" from IPv4, but as a developer those mostly don't matter and if your network engineer wants you pattern matching your network's machines, then you can just as easily pattern match your network's machines as with IPv4. (That said, there's privacy reasons your network engineers might not want that, security through obscurity and all that. That can be just as true in IPv4, but fewer companies have enough IPv4 address space to truly obfuscate the network patterns. Life is harder for network engineers in IPv6 not entirely because it "has to be" but because "privacy and security is 'easier' if we use a more complicated approach to IPv6 than we did with IPv4 where we would just sequentially number machines within our allotted space".)
Maybe if you only have five VMs or something, but when there are 100 or more the additional bits in an IPv6 address will be useful. You can recognize a whole subnet as dev, or production, or a different site, or the office LAN.
I can see plenty of situations where colons behaviour might be confusing, let’s start with a http url on a non standard port with credentials embedded, I assume something close to http://01:02@03:04:05:06:07:8000/foo/bar would be a valid url,
