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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#41

The article doesn't make sense. It can technically work with a bunch of dynamic DNS systems. An IPv6 address isn't fixed to your device like a MAC address is. Even assuming it would be doable, it would be a security nightmare, and we'd end up relying on some centralised systems anyway lest we burden the internet with absolutely insane amounts of continual p2p discoveries. If you want a personal website, why not use a…

That seems exceptionally reasonable, nomad. That would be pretty easy to anonymize as well. It's a pleasure to meet you.

I'll add that Resilio Sync + singlefile Tiddlywiki (I think most people would be surprised what TW can accomplish) from a phone is quite workable (a filewatcher with ratox or may toxic, or IPFS, would do as well, but they aren't as performant or turnkey). You can automatically push with custom conditions (or manually do so) to those listening (the burden has to be shifted away from the phone to some degree). If you have persistent seeders in the mutable torrent swarm, it's even better. That would serve a very large number of people on the planet pretty well, imho. This is harder to anonymize on a phone, but also doable.

It's reasonable to do both, too.

Add a proper USB to boot with, and it would sometimes be easy enough to walk up to a random machine when you need more than a phone to work on your Tiddlywiki or other infrastructure. I admire trying to find ways to make sure almost anyone can participate in The Great Conversation with minimal material; it's an important problem.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#42
post #36

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. I sympathize with this, but disagree. There are a lot a great free options for hosting a website. I personally use GitHub Pages, but Netlify, Vercel, and even Glitch offer excellent free tiers. Heck, if you just want to put some words on the web, WordPress.com offers free blog hosting. All of thes…

Why is phone battery going to die? Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its handling for all your personal data from every app installed.

It’s only doing that intermittently when you’re not interacting with the device.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. You can't hack a web server in your closet to run on port 80 without jailbreaking your phone/unlocking the bootloader and rooting your phone, and I can't really think of a reason wh…

Unrestrained webservers on phones is an edge case that would certainly be abused by all sorts of crapware while being a very uncommon usecase for mobile devices at all.

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#44
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is phone battery going to die? Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its handling for all your personal data from every app installed.

It’s only doing that intermittently when you’re not interacting with the device.

Depends on the app and what permissions you set

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. You can't hack a web server in your closet to run on port 80 without jailbreaking your phone/unlocking the bootloader and rooting your phone, and I can't really think of a reason wh…

Unrestrained webservers on phones is an edge case that would certainly be abused by all sorts of crapware while being a very uncommon usecase for mobile devices at all.

Apps can already do this mostly and it's caused absolutely no issues. In fact, it's often used for ad-blocking. You just can't bind to port 80/443.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#46
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is phone battery going to die? Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its handling for all your personal data from every app installed.

It’s only doing that intermittently when you’re not interacting with the device.

If you’re getting more than a thousand requests a day you’re gonna move to a real web host anyway

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#47
hosting a website properly just isn't that difficult or expensive.

if somebody wants to have a website, they can. there's plenty of free options that don't involve a device that has intermittent connectivity, runs off a battery, and that you probably don't want to enable remote access to for security reasons.

the reason people don't set up personal websites is that they don't want to. not becauase they can't host it. facebook does a better job of serving the "personal website" niche than personal websites do. the dream of every person having their own website is a thing that tech nerds want from others, not a thing that most people want for themselves

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. You can't hack a web server in your closet to run on port 80 without jailbreaking your phone/unlocking the bootloader and rooting your phone, and I can't really think of a reason wh…

I chose to purchase a phone that can’t do this. I’m fine with that. I’d rather my phone be how it is. I don’t need some nerd fighting for me in some imagined battle. I am incredibly sick of this line of reasoning. Anyone who spends any time arguing this point quite clearly has too much time on their hands and no real problems. It’s utterly cringey. Leave me be.

I come baring bad news; your smartphone can host webpages whether you like it or not. Worse yet, it can use it's browser to render arbitrary pages of data (detestable feature) and even execute code when given permission by the kernel. Very scary stuff.

Thankfully, nobody will be forcing you to use this feature; it shouldn't bother someone who ignores it. It is a feature of your phone though, unless you're daily-driving a pager or 2G Nokia. Hopefully this helps you make peace with the "utterly cringey" reality of modern computing.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#49

Please no. Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors where there's a poor signal or none at all. They make terribly unreliable servers. Not to mention how much faster this would chew up battery life. If you want to keep a spare phone plugged in all the time in your closet, connected to Wifi/Ethernet, and hack it to be a webserver, then go ahead. But webservers on mobile devices, being used in a mobil…

Personal websites are info only. Don't change that much. Google can and should cache results. Once synced, the website could be behind Cloudflare to avoid DDoS.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrestrained webservers on phones is an edge case that would certainly be abused by all sorts of crapware while being a very uncommon usecase for mobile devices at all.

Apps can already open ports and with the HTTP DNS record arbitrary ports can be used to serve http/3 content. Services like RDP and several types of VPN server all connect to unprivileged ports any app can listen on. There should be a separate permission for listening on standard, reserved ports (anything in the IANA docs for all I care) that should require manual consent, like with location access. In fact, I think…

You don't need reserved ports for the custom protocos.. And most of them, like sync apps, use high port anyway.
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