alt Hacker NewsI agree.
It's easy to tell someone to connect to something like 203.0.113.88. Many of us here, and also normal folks, have been saying dotted-octets like that for decades, now, and there's a familiar patter to the way that addresses like this flow off of the tongue.
It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. It's literally difficult to say, like saying it is intended to be some kind of test. And on the other end? Sure, we "all" "learned" hexadecimal at some point in school, but regular humans don't use hex so it sounds like missile launch codes (at best) or some kind of sadistic prank (at worst) to them. It reeks of phonic unfamiliarity and disdain.
(This is the part where the DNS folks invariably show up to announce that I'm holding it wrong. And I love DNS; I do. But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.)
(After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with.)
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> After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with
Ok, I'll bite. Why exactly do you not have the ability to select the address?
As a general rule, if you care about an IPv6 address enough that you have to type it in somewhere, you should be assigning it manually, and if you're doing that you can make it a lot friendlier than 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. The whole second half of the address can be shortened to ::<digit>, where the length of <digit> scales logarithmically to the number of memorable addresses you want in that network.
My network at home uses ULA addresses for everything, and I just use my phone number in the first half, so the address of my router at home is e.g. fd21:2555:1212::1, my NAS is fd21:2555:1212::a, etc. The global (GUA) address is something like 2601:abc:def:1201::a, which isn't that bad.
Hell, if you don't care about the potential of conflicts if you ever merge networks with someone else, you can just use fd00:: as your ULA prefix, and your router can be fd00::1, your NAS box can be fd00::2, etc. Shorter than IPv4 addresses!
> It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e.
If you would like your IPv6 addresses to be more human-friendly, you could use DHCPv6 (in addition to/instead of SLAAC) and end up with addresses like 2001:db8:3c7:4f80::123. Sure, it's 5 groups of e.g. 3-4 hex digits rather than 4 groups of up to 3 digits, but I think it's much easier than your example. You might set your router to use <prefix>::1 and/or fe80::1 (see OpenWRT's ipv6 suffix/ip6ifaceid option).
DNS servers (that you might occasionally have to type into config by hand) tend to have "nice" IPv6 addresses, e.g. Quad9 apparently uses 2620:fe::fe [1].
> But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.
I think dnsmasq can these days create AAAA records for local machines whose hostnames it learns via e.g. DHCP.
If you have a public server on the internet and your provider gives you a random-looking address using all 128 bits (and no /64 prefix for example) perhaps using (public) DNS is fine.
Opinions my own.
[1] https://quad9.net.