So I was looking into getting port forwarding set up and I realized just how closed-off the internet has gotten since the early days. It's concerning. It used to be you would buy your own router and connect it to the internet, and that router would control port-forwarding and what-have-you.
Now, your ISP provides your router, which runs their firmware, which (in my case) doesn't even have the option to enable port forwarding.
It gets worse - because ISPs are choosing NATs over IPv6, so even if you install a custom firmware on your router without it getting blacklisted by your ISP, you still can't expose your server to the internet because the NAT refuses to forward traffic your way. They even devise special NAT schemes like symmetric NAT to thwart hole punching.
Basically this all means that I have to purchase my web hosting separately. Or relay all the traffic through an unnecessary third party, introducing a point of failure.
It's frustrating.
I like to control my stuff. I don't like to depend on other people or be in a position where I have to trust someone not to fuck with my shit. Like, if the only thing outside my apartment that mattered to my website was a DNS record, I'd be really happy with that.
Edit: TIL ISPs in the US don't have NATs
Edit 2: OMG so much advice. My knowledge about computers is SO clearly outdated, I have a lot of things to read up on.
Edit 3: There's definitely a CGNAT involved since the WAN ip in the router config is not the same as the one I get when I use a website that echos my IP address. Far as I can tell ~~my devices don't get unique IPv6 addresses either~~. (funnily enough, if I check my IP address on my phone using roaming data, there's no IPv6 address at all). It's a router/modem combo, at least I think since there's only one device in my apartment (maybe there's a modem managing the whole complex or something?). And it doesn't have a bridge mode, except for OTT. Might try plugging my own router into it, but it feels like a waste of time and money from what I'm seeing. Probably best to just host services over a VPN or smth.
Edit 4: Devices do get unique IPv6 addresses, but it's moot since I can't do anything but ping them. I guess it wouldn't be port forwarding but something else that I would have to do that my router doesn't support
Oh, the other Americans are gonna have to face the music eventually too. I just never had any issue with foreign cultures to begin with. I was the kind of kid who was on web forums in the early aughts saying "don't judge the guy for his grammar, he might not be a native speaker, you don't know that". And that was before I learned of the concept of a dialect. So I'm just overall tired of dealing with this sort of childish "my culture good their culture bad" thinking that nobody seems to have grown out of.
But, you know, I have a very special beef with englishmen, because every time I was like "oh hey have you heard of biscuits and gravy" they'd be like "no wonder Americans are so fat" immediately, without second thought, and refuse to listen to the clarification about what a biscuit is (this was before I knew a British scone was basically an American biscuit but richer and sweet).
And, I mean, it's all superficial and silly until you remember what happens when someone dares to fiddle with European food and make it their own. Masala Chai, Vietnamese Banh Mi, Philipino Spaghetti, all these innovations were met with by violence from the colonizers. Couldn't let people just enjoy their own things.
But it's gonna be different this time. When America's empire falls, there will be no western power to take its place. The era of global western hegemony is finally coming to an end.