hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Drop #584 (2025-01-02): Looking Back To Move Forward

hrbrmstr

Divided We [Still] Fall [Online]; Check Your [IPv]6; Re-De-Centralization

Today’s somewhat soapbox-y Drop take a few more strolls through some 2024 topics with the goal of both raising awareness and some calls to action (or, at least, calls to keep some things in mind as we go about publishing our creative endeavors in 2025+).

TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop using Ollama + llama 3.2 and a custom prompt.)

Divided We [Still] Fall, Online

We’ll be talking quite a bit more, this year, about ensuring that the messages we craft are accessible to everyone. With that in mind, I thought starting off the year with a review of what [internet] access looks like around the globe would be in order.

The latest International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report on digital development paints a pretty complex picture of our connected world. While all the en vogue tech and mainstream media headlines tout the march of 5G technology and growing internet adoption, the ITU data reveals a continued deepening digital inequality that is poised to leave billions behind.

The numbers are stark: two-thirds of humans are online, but that “online” word does not mean “equally online”. In high-income nations, digital connectivity is nearly universal. Meanwhile, in low-income countries, barely a quarter of the population has Internet access. This gap manifests most dramatically in 5G deployment, where coverage ranges from 84% in wealthy nations to just 4% in their poorer counterparts.

Perhaps most concerning is the persistent urban-rural divide. Rural communities, particularly in developing regions, face a double disadvantage — not only are they less likely to have access to advanced networks, but — when they do — the quality of service often lags significantly behind urban areas.

The data suggests that without targeted intervention, these digital inequalities will continue to amplify existing socioeconomic disparities. As we march forward to an eventual “digital-first” world, ensuring meaningful connectivity for all isn’t just a technical challenge — it’s an imperative for global equity and development.

To arrive at an equitable future will require more than just infrastructure investment. It demands a holistic approach that addresses affordability, digital skills, and the quality of access. Only then can we ensure that digital transformation truly serves everyone, not just those fortunate enough to live in the right postal code or income bracket.

It’s probably best to keep the ITU 2024 internet stats in mind (assuming you at least skimmed the report) the next time you decide to “pull a hrbrmstr” and suggest a giant DuckDB WASM download — as part of a web project — is perfectly fine (Narrator: it’s not.). While it will slow down some projects this year, I’m going to do my best to ensure there are multiple paths to larger data-driven things I unleash.

Check Your [IPv]6

2024 marked a significant year for IPv6 adoption and development across the globe. Global IPv6 coverage broke through the 30% mark for the first time, with leading nations reaching or approaching 70% coverage. By November 2024, 38.81% of global internet traffic was transmitted via IPv6; and mobile IPv6 traffic has now surpassed IPv4 in leading nations.

IPv6-only datacenters emerged as a growing trend, and Rv6 (Segment Routing over IPv6) saw increased adoption, particularly for 5G and cloud services.

Major cloud providers expanded IPv6 support; and — somewhat shockingly — even one of the worst providers on the planet — Azure — announced inbound IPv6 support for multiple services.

We can expect to see more growth in IPv6 as multiple countries implemented new IPv6 mandates and guidelines, including the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Despite the progress, significant hurdles remain, as only ~⅓rd of the Internet’s user base can access IPv6-only services. With an estimated 20B devices using the Internet in late 2024, the IPv4 routing table only encompasses approximately 3.03B unique addresses, and network address translation (NAT) will only get us so far (it’s done a fine job up until now, though).

Global adoption of IPv6 will likely break the 50% barrier by the end of 2024. With the never-ending supply of garbage consumer IoT devices, and the “need” to drive [CPU & GPU] compute to the edge, IPv6-only access modes are going to be inevitable. If you haven’t taken the time to brush up on our brave, new v6 world, this might be the year to do so.

Re-De-Centralization

Decentralized networks made significant progress in 2024, with Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky leading the transformation of social media. Threads reached 100 million daily active users and began integrating with the Fediverse, marking Meta’s first step away from walled gardens. Despite this milestone, many Fediverse instances blocked Threads due to Meta’s problematic history with privacy and moderation.

Like it or not, Bluesky emerged as 2024’s breakout platform, growing from 200,000 to over 25 million users. Its AT Protocol enables portable user identities and data, though it remains more centralized than Mastodon (which has also likely helped fuel adoption). The platform has focused on providing a familiar X-like experience while building tools for community innovation.

Where digital humans go, 💵 will follow, and it’s estimated that decentralized web market hit 2.18billionin2023andisprojectedtoreach2.18billionin2023andisprojectedtoreach65.78 billion by 2032. This growth reflects increasing frustration with concentrated power in big tech platforms. The push toward decentralization is happening at multiple levels — from the aforementioned social networks to core internet infrastructure like DNS resolvers.

Small-scale decentralization efforts are showing promise. Rather than attempting complete decentralization of all services, focused efforts on critical infrastructure components are gaining traction. This “dream small” approach prioritizes practical improvements over theoretical perfection (i.e., “the perfect is the enemy of the good”).

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (arXiv) (a.k.a., DePINs) represent a novel network architecture that addresses limitations of traditional centralized infrastructure by combining blockchain technology with physical device management. Applications of this emerging tech fall into physical modes, such as sensor networks for energy, smart cities, environment, mobility and wireless networks including 5G, WiFi, LoRaWAN, and Bluetooth; as well as purely digital modes, such as bandwidth services (VPN, CDN, Web Proxy), storage solutions, general computing services, and AI infrastructure.

I mention DePINs in this review of decentralization as the total market cap increased 326.3% from 3.1Bto3.1Bto11.8B between 2023 and 2024. Sure, this is fake money, but the fake money of Bitcoin (et al.) has made many an IRL [bm]illionaire, and there are serious market forces behind many of the DePIN “innovations”. It’s possible you won’t be able to have an internet connection in some communities without being part of it (since greed fuels most things nowadays). Even without your ISP forcing this on you, companies like Helium have made more significant inroads than I expected them to.

2025+ presents an opportunity for us all to take back who we are and what we create/publish. Since it’s unlikely most of us have the resources to become our own ISPs or hosting providers, perhaps it’s also the time to consider an approach where we will still have some centralized services, but with an open infrastructure where decentralized innovation can occur.

At a more practical level, perhaps we can all start by ensuring whatever we post to a login-walled forum, Discord channel, or social media site is also posted to a [micro]blog we control, backed by a low-tech RSS feed everyone can access.

FIN

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