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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

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My blog has been on the front page of Hacker News a couple of times with GitHub Pages. It didn't break a sweat.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#53
post #8

On my Nokia N90i, I used to run Apache and PHP and a gallery web app to serve up the phone's camera roll on the wifi interface. Was quite useful at times. Symbian was a terribly quirky platform to develop for, but there were some quite cool things.

You still can on modern phones: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-services You'll have to use port 8080 or some other high port number because of privileged ports, but for just temporarily sharing your camera roll that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Yup, I love Termux. It's what makes my Android phone useful as a tool.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#54
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.

[deleted]

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#55
I actually agree with the logic. Not necessarily on a phone you take out but an average Android phone running Linux should be able to do this.

You can have a very usable web server and have custody over your own data/website.

Couple it with a Wireguard VPN to an IPv6 tunnel broker and you're golden.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#56
I really like this in a cyberpunk-kind-of-way, but think it's impractical from a data usage perspective + the fact that your ip should change frequently on any mobile device.

In the abstract, I feel like editing a file on your phone vs. editing a file somewhere "in the cloud" isn't so different if the interface makes it indistinguishable, so I don't know if you get any real benefit to toting around your webserver...

but I like the notion of a homegrown, self-managed webserver that you keep in your pocket.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#57

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…

> HTTP DNS record

Can you tell me more about that?

I know about SRV records from Minecraft (of all things!) for a similar purpose, can you point me towards a reference of what is this about? Wikipedia fails me.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#58

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. ~$5-7 a month for a web server via various platforms. A better one than your phone would be, most likely—certainly more stable. I don't think that's what's stopping people, I think most people just don't have a use case for hosting a web site. In my 90s dream of the technohippie utopia they would…

I think it’s axiomatic that an order of magnitude more time will be spent on consuming content than producing it. Why would you spend hours every day crafting a deeply insightful blog if literally no one ever read it? As an author or other content producer, you want people to consume your work. Therefore, the equilibrium between content and consumption must settle on dramatically more consumption than production.

I think this handily explains why the “personal website for every human” utopia never came to pass.

(Yes, I know some people will produce great content purely for the joy of doing it, and don’t care if anyone consumes it. I think that’s an edge case, not the operandus of every living person)

P.S. You’re completely right about the $5-7/mo hosting. I used to run a server in my home, but discovered I was spending more on electricity than the cost of leasing a small VPS. Centralizing has fantastic economies of scale.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know about privileged ports, they just don't make sense anymore. They were a good idea on a timeshared system with groups of students logging into their own shells because equivalent personal computers were unaffordable. These days, computers are used by one, maybe two or three people. If I, the only user of my phone, decide I want to use port 80, why can't I? Put this stuff behind a special privilege for all I car…

IIRC macOS got rid of privileged ports for these reasons. Dunno about iOS... But in any case what cell provider is going to let you handle inbound traffic? Most of the wifi networks you are on are NAT'd, etc. At best you'd probably want an outbound persistent tunnel that is "terminated" by a relay elsewhere. At that point you might as well just have the relay host the thing.

You're not getting inbound connections on IPv4 without a fight, although, I remember when you used to be able to pay mobile carriers to get a public IPv4 address that might have also been static(!) for VPN purposes. But it's not uncommon for carriers to give you a whole /64 on IPv6, and for that to be full proper connectivity (maybe they block smtp and smb, that's very common).

Yeah, IPv6 isn't everywhere, but if you have it on your phone and everywhere you want to access you phone from...

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#60

On the same basis, most home routers are powerful enough to run a basic webserver, and they are much more likely to have a consistent internet connection. They probably aren't behind CG-NAT, and most of them have Dynamic DNS support even if they don't have a static IP.

Exactly - I have a drawer full of consumer electronics which could be hacked to better run a web server than my iPhone.
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