Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 432 posts

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#141

Post by throwaway894345 »

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…

Has anyone managed to find a reasonable way to make an old android phone into a server in a reasonably practical/maintainable way? Even if it is plugged in all the time?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#142

Post by OfSanguineFire »

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.

Millions of people won’t want to host a website from their phone, simply because millions of people are no longer used to navigating to obscure third-party websites. They don’t do it themselves much, and they don’t expect their peers to do it.

The internet activity of younger generations today is increasingly centered around use of only a handful of websites, mostly provided through dedicated phone apps. Unless a person’s own website gets promoted by a social-media site’s algorithm, or comes up at the top of a Google search, no one is going to visit that URL.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#143

Post by dTal »

crazygringo wrote: post #89
seiferteric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I thought this was silly, but if your service provider provided and upstream cdn/cache, I think it could work pretty well. So when you are out of service area, they simply hit the cache.

Then there's no reason to have it on your phone in the first place. There's no real difference between a site on a server and a cache on a server from any kind of philosophical decentralization point of view. Just put the thing on the server in the first place and forget about the phone entirely.

The argument is that control can't be taken away from you, I suppose. I argue in another comment[0] that peer-caching could mitigate unreliability, but that still leaves the question of how you maintain ownership if other entities are allowed to serve it on your behalf. Is it possible to make yourself reliably globally routable without trusting a third party, or needing their permission?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37103721

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#144

Post by drdaeman »

dTal wrote: post #136
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).

HTTP is different than SMTP or NNTP. A phone could work as a nice personal mailhost, if power management issues could be solved.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#146

Post by TZubiri »

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…

Proposal rejected. Websites run on web server. Phones are not servers.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#147

Post by dTal »

drdaeman wrote: post #144
dTal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

HTTP is different than SMTP or NNTP. A phone could work as a nice personal mailhost, if power management issues could be solved.

It's true, I was imagining some something more sophisticated than HTTP. But I guess the article wasn't.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#148

Post by enos_feedler »

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…

Its almost like the real reason mobile web servers don’t exist is because its a terrible idea and not because companies secretly don’t want them to

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#150

Post by bandergirl »

karaterobot wrote: post #29

> 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…

$60 a year is a lot of money for a lot of the world. I met people who spent that much a month for a bed to live on.

The cheapest PHP/MySQL hosting in my country is $18/year

Post reply on HN