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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

#131

Post by mch82 »

paxys wrote: 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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#132

Post by madacol »

A bigger reason we should be able to run websites on our phones is to run decentralized or local-first web apps, but this requires also solving that our phones' network become accessible (e.g. implement Ipv6, but preferably bootstrap some fancy mesh network on-the-fly)

We should be chatting p2p through wifi/bluetooth by just letting our friends scan a QR code that links to our phone's web server that serves a p2p client for real-time chat in the middle of the jungle

In that same way, we should be playing games, take notes, run fair micro elections / lotteries, and hundreds of other coordination apps

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#133

Post by jeroenhd »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #94
jeroenhd wrote: post #12

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…

Hot take: Android is not an operating system. Go install AOSP and see how useless your device becomes. An OS is more than a kernel and filesystem, it's also a basic set of userspace utilities and functionality. Last time I installed AOSP on a device- wifi wasn't even supported. And Google is removing messaging from AOSP. Phone OS my ass, it's useless without 3rd party cruft that isn't available to end users.

AOSP contains a music player, a gallery, a camera app, a web browser, a calendar and some dev tools. Sure, they haven't been updated for a few years, but that doesn't mean they're not there. WiFi and LTE work just fine as long as your manufacturer uses hardware supported by normal drivers.

That said, office supplies don't make something an operating system. If all it had was a launcher, it would still be an operating system, because you can install the apps you want onto it.

I don't know why your device didn't have WiFi, ut it's not the norm. Standard AOSP images should use the vendor partition to load additional drivers if the ones built into the Android kernel don't suffice.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#134

Post by solardev »

anderspitman wrote: post #126
paxys wrote: 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…

> 99.99999% of people want to host nothing at all While I agree this is true today, people also didn't know they wanted cars or smartphones until good implementations were made. Smartphones existed for many years but were niche before the iPhone. We as an industry have thus far completely failed to show the value of self hosting.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#135

Post by giantrobot »

raarts wrote: post #86

How about: every internet router should have 10TB of space for household member data and an API to request personal details like medical data. May soon be commercially viable.

The "S" in IoT stands for security. A bunch of file servers inadvertently connected to the Internet isn't the best idea. Leaked personal data and botnets will just be the start of the problems.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#136

Post by dTal »

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…

We've had networks composed of unreliable nodes before - indeed, this assumption is baked into some of our oldest protocols, like email and usenet. All that is required is for at least 2 equally unreliable peers to act as temporary caching servers to bring the effective uptime up from 95% to 99.99% (provided everyone's downtime is uncorrelated).

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#137

Post by Groxx »

Espionage724 wrote: post #39

What's stopping anyone today with Android from installing Termux, proot, a distro of their choice, and then hosting a webserver?

Port 80 / 443 privileges at the device's networking level, mostly. If you don't need those there are indeed plenty of options (e.g. hosting onion sites works fine).

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#138

Post by jeroenhd »

hilbert42 wrote: post #108
jeroenhd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because phones have all-day battery life because they turn off the radios as often as possible, sending and receiving data in short bursts. Lingering sockets are shut down for non-system services and push messages are exchanged through dedicated messaging providers with power management planning built in. It's one of the reasons running standard Linux, or even de-Googled Android, on a normal Android device can absolu…

"...or even de-Googled Android, on a normal Android device can absolutely tank your battery life." Not necessarily. About eight hours ago I was having trouble with the GPS on my main phone (I cleared GNSS on GPStest app and it wasn't refreshing fast enough), so I found another in my assortment of phones that was still running and had some charge left in it and used it (it also had GPStest installed)—and I'm using it…

A de-Googled device doing very little will have great battery life. Once you load up a chat app or two, that battery life quickly starts degrading, because every app starts polling a server for updates.

Most people use some kind of app that receives push updates from the internet onto their smartphones, whether that's Facebook or WhatsApp. If you can live without those apps then you'll have a much better time, because the WiFi can actually turn itself off completely and the phone modem can fall back to a state as passive as possible.

You don't need to de-Google your phone for this effect. Just disable all internet access (WiFi off/disconnected, cellular data off) and your phone can last a day longer. Works great for devices repurposed as navigation systems!

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#140

Post by nroets »

mch82 wrote: post #131
paxys wrote: 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 registered a domain, paid for word press hosting, learned the set up and started writing my travel journal there. The photos display in full HD without ads.

But most family and friends forget to visit it, because Facebook is not promoting my website.

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