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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

#151

Post by teddyh »

tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #35
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…

I chose to purchase a phone that can’t do this. I’m fine with that. I’d rather my phone be how it is. I don’t need some nerd fighting for me in some imagined battle. I am incredibly sick of this line of reasoning. Anyone who spends any time arguing this point quite clearly has too much time on their hands and no real problems. It’s utterly cringey. Leave me be.

“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/>

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#152

Post by TZubiri »

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.

True. The SMTP has provisions that account for the host server being powered off, a personal computer was a reasonable host for this protocol.

The sending client is supposed to retry if the receiving server is down.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#154

Post by crazygringo »

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).

Which is why it works perfectly fine to send e-mail when you're on a plane without WiFi -- it's designed to send once you've got a connection.

But the article is about a personal website. Websites run over HTTP, which is not designed for anything unreliable.

It's interesting to think about a web that was designed to have lots of intermediary caching peers along the way as part of the protocol, but that's not what we have.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#155

Post by TZubiri »

jeroenhd wrote: post #12
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…

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…

The assumption that an operating system should allow the user to do everything is quite restricting.

Under this view, every device should be a standard-issue military-grade turing-machine. There would be no individuality, every device would be the same GPL licensed Free Operating System.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#156

Post by Nathan2055 »

solardev wrote: post #134
anderspitman wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 problem (you’d still need a separate account for each forum and blog you wanted to comment on; OpenID almost solved this issue but was a nightmare to work with, Mozilla Persona (which is not the same thing as Mozilla Personas, wow that company is bad at naming things) would have definitely solved this issue if that company had spent more than twenty minutes promoting it), but it did solve the actual fundamental issue that most people seem to be getting at with these modern systems: it offered a way to collate and display updates from a wide variety of mutually incompatible Internet sources all together in one place.

It’s an incredible simple pitch, even to non-technical people: display your YouTube subscriptions, Twitter follows, blogs you’re interested in, and news sites that you read all in one place, in software that you control.

The problem is that operating a “platform” rather than a website got to be too profitable, and suddenly the goal shifted from serving useful content to make you want to come back to a site to serving enough content that you never want to leave to begin with. Many people believe that if Google had made Reader the center of their social strategy rather than killing it to pursue a short-sighted attempt to compete directly with Facebook, we could be looking at a much healthier Internet today (and Google probably could be earning a lot more money than they currently are, considering the abysmal adoption rate of modern Google services is often argued to be directly linked to fear of shutdown).[1]

Personal websites died for the mainstream because Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered a better interface for the average consumer. But they could be brought back by a system that made the good parts of those sites interoperable. Frankly, this is the kind of thing that I want to see Mozilla pursuing again, not...whatever the heck they’re doing now. (You go their website and they’re selling Pocket, which is basically a bad centralized version of what I’m talking about; a rebadged VPN service; an email alias service; and Firefox. What happened to the people who tried to do things like Persona?)

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#157

Post by [deleted] »

jeroenhd wrote: post #138
hilbert42 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...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, becaus…

[deleted]

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#158

Post by Angostura »

soulofmischief wrote: post #98
FireInsight wrote: post #17

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…

I'm intrigued. Should all smart refrigerators be able to run web servers? TVs? Would you want them to?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#159

Post by nixpulvis »

I mean, yes… but also why? For testing, or when I’m away from my computer, sure!

Popularizing dynamic DNS seems like a good idea, but may require new protocols altogether in order to support all the IP address changes. But yea, more edge compute; owned by the source. Sounds good to me.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#160

Post by froggit »

ilyt wrote: post #109
soulofmischief wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the option is there, rooting. As long as that is reasonably available I don't really see problem. Of course the seven hells of apple ecosystem is another matter You can argue all you want about what the normal joe shmoe should be able to do but most joes shmoes will use that to hurt themselves more than help. Limitiations are essentially OSHA of computing, by making it hard to do the wrong stuff it makes most peo…

Locked bootloaders.
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