this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Fix Your IPv6 for Matter & Thread (UniFi Guide) (www.youtube.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by uuj8za@piefed.social to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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Matter and Thread don’t randomly “break”. Most of the time — your IPv6 network isn’t ready.

Gah. I feel like I have to debug thread pairing every time I get a new device... I definitely haven't checked my router settings though...

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[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

Here's how to fix IPv6:

Don't do IPv6.

And here's the simple reason why: the IPv6 address space is so huge every device can be assigned its own, easily-tracked fixed IP, which is a bonanza for the techno-fascist Big Data companies.

The very raison d'etre of IPv6 - which is to solve the IPv4 address scarcity problem and do away with all the nasty hacks to get around it - was desirable before surveillance capitalism, when the internet wasn't a dangerous, adversarial place. Now you want as much IPv4 NAT and masquerading as you want, to make tracking you a little bit harder.

[–] nialv7@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

you can easily periodically switch to randomly generated new addresses if you are so paranoid.. your conspiracy theory doesn't make sense.

and like, your mac address is already globally unique, are you worried about those too?

[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

you can easily periodically switch to randomly generated new addresses

You can do that in your computer. Not so much in embedded devices.

and like, your mac address is already globally unique, are you worried about those too?

MAC addresses are far from unique (they're only 6 bytes long). And MAC address aren't encoded in IP packets.

[–] nialv7@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago

if it's an embedded device you don't fully control, the company that made it can track it with or without ipv6. and if you do fully control its software then you surely can make it change ip addresses

[–] giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

oooh, the ipv6 evangelist are gonna hate this.🍿

[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

To be clear: IPv6 IS the correct and elegant technical solution to the exhausted IPv4 address space, and I was very much in favor of it for many years. In fact, I deplored that its rollout, which should have been swift and forceful, never truly happened in earnest.

But that was before corporate surveillance. Now I always downgrade to IPv4, not out of technical necessity, but out of a sense of self-preservation.

Although I'm very well aware that corporate surveillance doesn't rely solely on tracking IPs anymore. But there's no sense in giving the sumbitches an easy way to track you when you don't have to.

[–] claude_flammang@dju.social 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@ExtremeDullard
Isn‘t that what firewalls are for?

[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago

Firewalls don't hide your IP. Maybe you're thinking of VPNs.

[–] undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 0 points 2 weeks ago

Why would the IPv6 addresses issued to you by your ISP be any less traceable than the one IPv4 address they typically give you? It’s fairly obvious which group of devices are related.

[–] maxwellfire@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago

There's like two people's devices behind my router. The amount of benefit I get to hiding which device is sending traffic is pretty meaningless. And all my user devices are using privacy extensions anyway.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to prevent. Like if I have an iot device that doesn't support privacy extensions, who am I making the tracking harder for by using ipv4? Anything the device talks to already is probably tracking via the device authenticating in the first place. And anybody in the middle doesn't really learn much by knowing that a particular device is sending opaque traffic vs the house is sending opaque traffic.

Big tech tracks us because we voluntarily login to their services. And they do so mainly to sell us ads. If you don't want them tracking you, hiding IP doesn't help much. Like don't login to their services and block requests to their domains to prevent third party site integrations. If you need to use their services anyway, then you're fundamentally screwed.

[–] Archer@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Engineers did actually anticipate this, y’know. There are IPv6 privacy extensions and Windows auto randomizes your MAC now

[–] 123@programming.dev 0 points 2 weeks ago

Great in theory, not so great for simple automations like seeing of people are home based on connected MAC addresses instead of relying on an app (that can't even run on the background consistently on modern mobile OSes).

[–] BennyInc@feddit.org 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’ll look into this today, as just yesterday I bought my first MatterOverThread devices and could not get them to work with Home Assistant. With long debugging yesterday I found out that any of these things I do could contribute to the problem:

  • running Home Assistant in Docker (with Host network mode)
  • not using IPv6 at all
  • using UniFi
  • using an AppleTV as Thread border router
  • some mDNS settings?
  • …

I could get them working in Apple Home. But the step to HA doesn’t…

[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 0 points 2 weeks ago

Good luck! This video worked for me! I was trying to pair an IKEA smart plug and fixing my router settings unblocked me!

running Home Assistant in Docker (with Host network mode)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this isn't one of the supported methods...... Cuz I was also doing this until recently! 😅

Running Home Assistant OS in a QEMU VM has been surprisingly easier and way more stable! Would recommend.

(I'm also using the ZBT-2 as my thread border router.)