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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#261

Post by cortesoft »

devnullbrain wrote: post #196

It's very sad that a forum of self-styled hackers can not see the value in a personal website. Our image of what the web is and should be has been poisoned by 99.999% uptime cloud-hosted tat.

The problem isn't the self hosting a website bit, it is the "oh your phone" bit. Our phone network doesn't have a ton of excess capacity, and building it out is expensive. A personal website has zero reason to run on your phone with you.

It would be way more efficient for the phone companies to simply give a free small VPS to phone customers who want one rather than allow them to host it on their phone.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#262

Post by fsflover »

nologic01 wrote: post #83

Unlocking the smartphone will be a singular event in computing history. Running a personal website is a metaphor for actually using the device fully and with agency. It cannot not happen. The drivers are the ever increasing commoditisation of quality hardware, the slow but steady maturity of open source software and the fact that it takes machination at planetary scale to prevent it from happening (ie keeping these e…

> Unlocking the smartphone will be a singular event in computing history

> It cannot not happen

It has already happened: GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, are already available.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#263

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

crazygringo wrote: post #5

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…

That's what IPFS is for. The site might be out of date if the device with the IPNS private key goes into a tunnel for a while, but as long as someone somewhere (ideally several someones) has pinned it and their device is available then it's not "down".

We just need a good algorithm for reciprocity-pinning.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#264

Post by smoldesu »

ehutch79 wrote: post #215
teddyh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works , not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.” — https://xkcd.com/743/ >

The lesson is open source needs to produce more accessible, usable software instead playing Cassandra

Did you post this comment before the third panel loaded, or are you in abject denial of the power you lack as a user of services such as Hacker News?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#265

Post by stcroixx »

vorticalbox wrote: post #166
circuit wrote: post #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/

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

Surely without any content restrictions or consequences to the account.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#267

Post by richardw »

I’ve been thinking on and off about personal hosting. Not just for web, for everything that I want hosted. Eg data, address, location, permissions to message me or mail me or read some of my photos or all the functionality we give up to the cloud overlords.

I don’t want it on my device. Battery, connectivity and uptime aren’t suited to hosting. But it should be something I can delegate to a service (or set of services) and only care about the hosting details of if I want to.

Problem is, every time I see anything on decentralised identity or hosting, it ends up as an unusable dogs breakfast. We’re not there yet, but it’s worth pondering as a possible future.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#269

Post by troupe »

_xivi wrote: post #217
troupe wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a webserver on your phone incurs all the same issues plus it might be out of range or your phone might be off. So having a webserver on your phone is actually worse.

> Running a webserver on your phone incurs all the same issues Huh, what? The issues I mentioned proceed from using services you don't own or have power over. How can I suffer from such issues on my own device? > out of range or your phone might be off and? If the owner is ok with that, where is the problem? Are people not permitted to walk because a car is faster?

Yes if none of those things are problems then it isn't an issue. Just that there aren't fewer issues with having a website on your phone by a company that doesn't have a core business of letting people serve http from their phone vs. having it hosted somewhere by a company where it IS their core business.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#270

Post by eternityforest »

I don't think anything personal should be on port 80. Too much work!

What I think we really need is more stuff like ngrok and cloudflare tunnels, in easier to use form.

If it has to go through centralized infrastructure anyway, I'd rather someone else process all the traffic first, maybe even keep DoSes out, handle the SSL, etc.

If self hosting is ever going to be a thing again, I think we either need that, or full P2P(I've written before about why we need to have something like .onion service URLs but without the anonymity, and even used a DIY implementation of the idea for a while).

But at the moment, without adding anything new to browsers, hosting through a cloud portal seems to be the most practical.

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