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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

161–170 of 432 posts

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#161
> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites.

"For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1]

Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting?

[1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#162

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.

I'm assuming the best intentions from you but I'd like to point out two things: 1. When discussing human rights (which apply to technological freedoms) reducing a need to "an edge case" is the basis of marginalization, defined as "treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral". Therefore, it is never appropriate to rely on such language to prove a point, especially when we are discussing sof…

It might feel good and noble to chide people about this stuff, but this type of hyperbolic, exaggerated grandstanding is THE reason why our society is so polarized. It is absolutely NOT slippery slope to human rights violations to talk about edge cases or to make tradeoffs. Escalating everything to such high stakes makes discussion and compromise impossible.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#164
post #131
post #105

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. Is there a single person on this planet who wants to host a website but can't and will start doing so if their mobile phone supported it? I'm going to guess no. 99.99999% of people want to host nothing at all (and probably don't know what web hosting is). For the ones that do, it is still a lot mo…

My sense is the opposite. Billions of people use Facebook & X because hosting their own website is too hard. It’s very likely millions of people would love a simple way to host a website from their phone.

I don't think so. What people want is a way to create some words, audio, pictures, video, etc and let people see it. The vast majority of people don't care at all about exactly what technological choices are used to make that happen. For a variety of reasons, services that are at least semi-centralized and running on proper servers in datacenters are vastly more effective at this than trying to run a web server on a mobile device being used in its intended role.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geocities, Tripod, MySpace, GoDaddy, WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot, SquareSpace... People just don't need or want this. Facebook has a network effect and shows you all your friends' posts. Having to visit fifty personal sites would be a pain.

> Having to visit fifty personal sites would be a pain. Which is why RSS (and Atom, but I’m just saying RSS because it’s less to type) was such a brilliant invention, and also why it was “killed.” Everyone is talking about things like “ActivityPub” and “interoperability” and “personalized algorithms” nowadays but RSS supported many of those features twenty years ago. Yeah, it didn’t solve the account portability prob…

> Everyone is talking about things like “ActivityPub” and “interoperability” and “personalized algorithms” nowadays but RSS supported many of those features twenty years ago.

RSS is read-only, ActivityPub allows back-and-forth interaction between servers. The two are not comparable.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#166

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. "For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1] Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting? [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

You can run a static site on github.com for free.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#168

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. "For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1] Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting? [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

Micropayments aren’t more of a thing already for a reason. There is friction and overhead with signing up for a 3P subscription service even if the actual dollar cost is negligible.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#169

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…

Unless you live in a tunnel, who cares? If you’re hosting a basic portfolio and personal site you don’t even need 2 9’s of reliability

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#170

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.

I'm assuming the best intentions from you but I'd like to point out two things: 1. When discussing human rights (which apply to technological freedoms) reducing a need to "an edge case" is the basis of marginalization, defined as "treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral". Therefore, it is never appropriate to rely on such language to prove a point, especially when we are discussing sof…

> 2. It's an incredibly slippery slope to use "crapware" as a justification for reducing the freedoms of the individual. Criminals will find a way, do not create a hostile user experience.

It's a legit security issue. Not protecting people from these things is far more user hostile.

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