True. But pinging IPs directly should only be done as a debug step when dns / mdns does not work. Aka extremely rarely.This all being said mdns is extremely reliable on lan. It’s literally just multicast dns on lan.

On my personal home network I have never had mdns fail in 5-ish years. FQDNs yah. DNS can break. But mdns has been solid.

Ok. Then a week of passive absorbing at worst. You got it. IPv6 is more complicated but not that much more complicated. You already know IPv4.

Humans shouldn’t really be typing in IPs. Why not just use localhost for localhost and dns / mdns for lan machines? It’s such a nicer experience.

mdns works with link-local in the case of a private non connected lan.

Have faith in yourself. I bet you could get things in a few hours with focused study if you have a deep understanding of IPv4.

IPv6 is now peaking over 50% of all internet traffic globally and trending up. IPv4 is today the minority of internet traffic.

In some countries like France IPv6 over 85% of all internet traffic. In Germany over 75%. USA 57% of all traffic. India 76% of all traffic.

Not a fan of Google but they keep statistics on adoption.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

I wouldn’t even say it was a good idea. Like the end to end NAT free internet is the ideal. IPv6 was built for that.

Even if IPv8 was not slop it would reenforce the idea of nat and hierarchy.

IPv6 allows for a democratized internet where anyone can choose to self host. And anyone can connect to anyone who is self hosting.

Because of this it’s a bit more complicated. But ideology it much better than IPv8. It brings us back what made the internet great in the 90s and 2000s, but at scale.

Just fyi IPv8 was written by LLM with full on hallucinated citations and references. It isn’t being taken seriously by anyone.

It didn’t even make sense. It relies on DNS for nat and the like. Deranged networking plans from the non-mind of an LLM.

I recommend taking the time to learn IPv6 properly. It’s actually quite elegant and brings back the peer to peer, endpoint to endpoint connection ability of the old internet.