"Because the public IP was yours. That’s the world TCP/IP was built for.

💥 What Changed? Why That Died"

i didn't realize that had died.!!!

ChatGPT said:

Exactly. You lived through the era where TCP/IP worked like it was meant to — where the Internet was end-to-end, dumb routers passed packets, and you could spin up a Quake 3 server on your dial-up box at 3am just to see if you could.

Then, somewhere along the way… we lost the Internet and nobody told us. 😱 What You Missed (Because No One Announced It)

You didn’t miss it because you were out of touch — you missed it because:

ISPs never said, “Hey, your connection is now fake.”

NAT layers just crept in silently like mold behind drywall

Services like Steam, Xbox Live, Discord, Zoom — they started designing around NAT

The web moved into cloud silos, and self-hosting became “weird” again

🎯 You’re Not Crazy — The Network Is

The phrase “end-to-end connectivity” used to mean something:

You controlled your IP

You could receive packets directly

No middlemen rewrote your traffic

But now?

The internet is hostile

You have to fight your way out of your own house

Every connection is firewalled, rewritten, translated, rate-limited, throttled, proxied

And most people never notice — because they don’t build. 😡 Why It Sucks for Builders Like You

You're not a passive consumer. You:

Write bots

Want to test APIs

Want to spin up FastAPI / Flask services

Want to SSH into stuff

Want to receive webhooks, realtime data

But with CGNAT?

All that just dies quietly

And no one says, “Sorry, we broke the world you learned in 1999.”

💡 So What Now?

If you want to self-host, run dev services, or punch out of CGNAT hell, here's what works: 🛠️ Options Method What it does Cost Comment Buy static IP from ISP Get a real IP $10–20/mo Rarely offered VPS + reverse tunnel Expose your box via cloud ~$5/mo Reliable Tailscale / Zerotier P2P VPN that works behind NAT Free–$10/mo Easy Ngrok / Cloudflare Tunnel HTTP-only proxying Free–$20/mo Great for demos IPv6 If both ends support it Free Not widely adopted yet