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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

331–340 of 432 posts

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You fail to see the irony that the only reason you have it so good with your phone software is because of the pushback of open source and open standards the nerds have had to always fight for.

The only reason? Tech people here have some very self-flattery view. The main reason, and I wouldn't call it the only reason, the phone being an essential item is because it meets the needs of average consumers, not just for the tiny tech population. If a website is what everyone wants, then trust me it will be front and center in any phone ads, not the camera.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#332

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.

Uh, it’s not personal websites we’re talking about. It’s hosting them on public facing servers on your phone specifically

"Personal website" doesn't mean and has never meant that you're the only person who can see it.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some people who want to, should be able to And this is a terrible argument IMO. The idea of “It’s my device, it’s my right to do exactly what I want with it” is beyond dead and buried. There are lots of things people want to do with their devices that Apple doesn’t let them do. That’s literally been Apple’s philosophy for decades and at this point it shouldn’t be surprising. Buy the Pinephone if you absolutely have…

Who said anything about Apple? Apple actually allows hosting content on port 80/443/22/whatever. Also, "I don't need this so nobody should have it" is a terrible take.

> "I don't need this so nobody should have it" is a terrible take

The opposite opinion that you seem to advocate is equally terrible -- "I want it so everyone should accept it" (which is the title of the post). How about you go advocate for a phone that supports it, says a Linux phone, and if it takes off and Apple/Google adopt it, then we can have it without this tiresome debate?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#335

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…

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#336
post #298

I see at least one very good reason why this shoud be possible: old phones. Reusing old phones as a webserver seems like a good idea to me, since they were built for power efficiency (unlike old PCs) and would otherwise simply end up as e-waste in a landfill or discarded, forgotten in a drawer somewhere. Maybe it's because I use LineageOS (and Cyanogen mod before that), but I never even knew that there were problems…

When you start up the hotspot, what address is your friend using to connect?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#337
I have had a desire for a long time to have one device that was central to everything that I did digitally. Until recently, I thought of the device being a phone that contained all my digital assets and relied on standard peripherals that are shared: wall screens, keyboards and monitors at public areas like libraries, monitor and docking setup at home, etc. Such a device would have encrypted backups on at least 2 independent cloud vendors, and if I lost my device, I could immediately buy a new one and have it refresh from a cloud backup.

Recently, since I often now leave my phone at home and just wear an Apple Watch, I am thinking that a smaller device than a phone would be good.

I am assuming the kind of infrastructure where my one device could privately and securely use ambient peripherals.

I think that too much of our life is spent maintaining and fooling around with digital devices. I think that a one device capability would let people make full use on digital infrastructure while freeing up time.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#338
Recently my robotics team started using a web app called SPOT for scouting matches at competitions, at first we used the recommended free hosting service, but we ran into some rate limiting issues, so I just cloned the project and hosted it on my home server.

Out of curiosity, I also tried hosting it on an old LG G2 phone I had around, and it worked great, even though this is a 10+ year old phone (currently running the last version of LineageOS that was available for it, Android 11)

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#339
post #298

I see at least one very good reason why this shoud be possible: old phones. Reusing old phones as a webserver seems like a good idea to me, since they were built for power efficiency (unlike old PCs) and would otherwise simply end up as e-waste in a landfill or discarded, forgotten in a drawer somewhere. Maybe it's because I use LineageOS (and Cyanogen mod before that), but I never even knew that there were problems…

>[phones] were built for power efficiency

most of that power efficiency is based on deep sleep modes and network packet batching. Opposite of what servers do

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#340
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 even this low bar is (imo sadly) currently impossible for someone who just has a spare phone in their closet and a bit of html knowledge looking forward to the unicorn that makes wordpress for ios/android

Unless that device has an Apple logo on it it is 100% possible.

I thought this sounded weird so I tried it.

It took me about two mins, and most of that was because I typed a minimal html page on my phone using vi.

My phone has an apple logo, and the whole point of the article is that android is the one which blocks you from doing this without jailbreak. But on an iPhone it takes like one minute and zero configuration. (I literally just ran `python3 -m http.server 80` with no issues in ish).

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