This is looking like a solution in search of a problem
Every phone should be able to run personal websites
21–30 of 432 posts
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#22Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.
Nobody should be running their personal website on their cellphone. When I read this type of diatribe, I hesitate to agree with it. Abstract considerations of freedom lose out to "you're going to tell people they should do this, and that is a bad thing".
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
You more or less described IPFS. Of course, IPFS grinds my gears because despite oodles of money and time, they still don't have a cohesive ecosystem SDK, haven't rebased on a Rust base, just squandering attention in the space, imo.
What does Rust have to do with it?!?
Take a look at Matrix and what the ecosystem is doing. The entire ecosystem is rebasing on the Rust SDK and bindings to it. It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort, and means there's fewer bugs with interoping clients because they're increasingly all using the same SDK.
It's considerably more flexible, more easily embedded than node or Go.
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#24Earlier 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…
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.
It's true that there will always be unscrupulous actors but there are many ways to restrict or punish them already, I don't see why they would necessarily overwhelm existing methods.
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#25[dead]
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#26I haven't done this but I've read about plenty of folks using Termux with an Android phone to host a server. Here's a guide from 2022.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-...
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does Rust have to do with it?!?
Take a look at Matrix and what the ecosystem is doing. The entire ecosystem is rebasing on the Rust SDK and bindings to it. It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort, and means there's fewer bugs with interoping clients because they're increasingly all using the same SDK. It's considerably more flexible, more easily embedded than node or Go.
> It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort
Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ...
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps Because they're Not that I agree with it, but it is the existing status quo.
I know about privileged ports, they just don't make sense anymore. They were a good idea on a timeshared system with groups of students logging into their own shells because equivalent personal computers were unaffordable. These days, computers are used by one, maybe two or three people. If I, the only user of my phone, decide I want to use port 80, why can't I? Put this stuff behind a special privilege for all I car…
IIRC macOS got rid of privileged ports for these reasons. Dunno about iOS... But in any case what cell provider is going to let you handle inbound traffic? Most of the wifi networks you are on are NAT'd, etc. At best you'd probably want an outbound persistent tunnel that is "terminated" by a relay elsewhere. At that point you might as well just have the relay host the thing.
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#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 all have extensive and idiosyncratic personal websites about various things they've soldered together, but that didn't work out. Turns out most people want to watch videos of other people doing things, and that is most efficiently hosted in a centralized place.
Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites
#30Earlier 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…
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.
Apps can already open ports and with the HTTP DNS record arbitrary ports can be used to serve http/3 content. Services like RDP and several types of VPN server all connect to unprivileged ports any app can listen on.
There should be a separate permission for listening on standard, reserved ports (anything in the IANA docs for all I care) that should require manual consent, like with location access. In fact, I think there should be a retractable permission for any kind of remotely accessible port binding. The fact any calculator app can start a VPN server on my phone without my knowledge isn't good! That doesn't mean providing any type of service is inherently bad, though.
For instance, there are tons of phone desktop sync apps (My Phone on Windows, KDE Connect on Linux/Windows/Mac) that constantly communicate between each other. Why should your phone always be the one to initiate that direct connection? Why should we rely on cloud servers when mutually authenticated SSH is already doing every bit of protection we could possibly need? My phone is half a meter away from my computer, it shouldn't need to be this difficult!