8 ms·

Imagine this but instead of needing any CLI skills, you just install a "blog" app on the phone, do a quick OAuth2 flow with your domain provider[0] to connect a

Imagine this but instead of needing any CLI skills, you just install a "blog" app on the phone, do a quick OAuth2 flow with your domain provider[0] to connect a domain through a tunnel, and you're ready to start posting. This is essentially my vision of the future of selfhosting. We have a lot of work to do, but the technology is all there. Also, if you're looking for similar tools to pinggy, I maintain a list here[1]. [0]: https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io https://takingnames.io/blog/introducing-takingnames-io [1]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling/ https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling/

renonce 3y ago
How can a mobile phone's network be as stable as that of a datacenter? Without that stability it's not going to be practically useful.
- sk0g 3y ago
  I guess a caching layer could help, like CloudFlare's DDoS protection that still tries to serve a page if a cached version exists. At that point I'm not sure if it's functionally different to syncing markdown files to something like S3 or GitHub pages.
  - cryptonym 3y ago
    Only works if the content is popular in your region and you are only half-self-hosting.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    > I guess a caching layer could help In practice this works only for trivial apps, that have no dynamic content, don't serve large files, don't see a lot of traffic, doesn't come from all over the world (each PoP has a separate cache), etc. CDN caching is opportunistic, most services assume server-grade hardware at the origin that can take some "warmup" load on its own. Also if you're introducing a third-party CDN/cache, you're already throwing away a whole bunch of reasons for self-hosting in the first place.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      In practice this works only for trivial apps, that have no dynamic content, don't serve large files, don't see a lot of traffic, doesn't come from all over the world (each PoP has a separate cache), etc. So something exactly like a blog then.
      - rollcat 3y ago
        True, but this means your solution is competing with Github pages, Netlify, etc. and your visitors are still subject to the whim of the caching layer. I'm not aware of any classical CDN product that works Great even when the origin server doesn't. Building a CDN for that purpose only would be extremely niche - generic CDNs with a hand-tuned caching policy are great at many other things, such as live video delivery, so you'd be building a non-generic CDN in a saturated market. Then the question of how does the CDN make itself aware of the content it needs to prefetch... once you devolve into that, well you've reinvented git push to Netlify, but with 10x the amount of quirks, oddball architecture, and less flexibility.
    - account42 3y ago
      > apps Make websites not apps.
      - rollcat 3y ago
        If you're building something as complex and convoluted as a blog hosted on a smartphone being tunnelled to the outside world and proxied through a purpose-built CDN, I don't think you can call it a website anymore. I do agree, let's build websites instead.
  - opan 3y ago
    Please (everyone), stop pushing cloudflare on to everyone.
    - sk0g 3y ago
      I'm not pushing anything, just haven't seen pass-through proxy that has a similar failure mechanism for when websites are down. They have enough of a market share without me promoting them anyway.
      - cryptonym 3y ago
        That's a feature of basically any CDN and some existed well before Cloudflare entered the market. Nowadays you find dozen of CDNs. A personal site may be fine without it. If your plan is having an offline version ready to be served, as you expect a lot of downtime, distributed cache might not be the best architecture. Some CDN offer a dedicated layer of cache in front of your origin, but that sounds overkill for a personal blog.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  Personal sites don't really need the kind of network stability we've come to expect. It would also be nice to see a move to more offline-tolerant networks for a lot of things.
  - guessbest 3y ago
    You know what is offline-tolerant? NNTP and email.
    - phkahler 3y ago
      >> You know what is offline-tolerant? NNTP and email. Imagine a distributed social network where updates come via email. Updates are identified by the email client (or other) and automatically sent to whatever program needs to process them. You end up with a local copy of everyones stuff that is kept for a period of time.
      - ianburrell 3y ago
        I have been working on idea for generic store-and-forward messaging. Basically, email for everything. The idea is that store-and-forward is more reliable when there are limited or no network. It would also work well for interplanetary communication. For some applictions, it is simple to fallback or use always and luckily the basics are included. Unfortunately, lots of applications won't work at all and many would have to be rewritten.
        rakoo 3y ago
        You're probably aware of http://www.nncpgo.org/ http://www.nncpgo.org/ then
        Fnoord 3y ago
        Why is this website hosted in Russia (given current geopolitics), and why does this website have a certificate issued by ca.cypherpunks.ru instead of say Let's Encrypt?
- Ajedi32 3y ago
  I would envision something like this being used with an older phone permanently connected to a charger and Wi-Fi or possibly a USB docking station with Ethernet, not running on your personal phone over mobile data. The latter would be terrible for battery life.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
chrnola 3y ago
I was kicking around a similar idea a few months ago but for a single-user Mastodon instance. Obviously a phone is a huge single point of failure, but there are likely dozens of hobbyist use-cases like this that don’t need strong reliability guarantees.
pier25 3y ago
> This is essentially my vision of the future of selfhosting What if you lose connectivity? What if you run out of battery? What if your phone breaks for some reason? For a blog I really don't see the advantage compared to a free static host.
- onion2k 3y ago
  99% of the challenge in running a blog is authoring posts. Serving the content is trivial. If using an app improves writing stuff it's a win.
ilyt 3y ago
being accessible 24/7 would burn battery like mofo tho.
Volundr 3y ago
You know, I read this and got exciting thinking "I could build that!". Then I got to thinking about the security implications of running a webserver on a personal phone exposed to the internet. I think I'll pass.
- kibwen 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be a personal phone. If you get a new phone, you could do a factory reset on your old phone and use it as a webserver in this way. And since you aren't taking it with you anywhere, you can leave it at home plugged in and on wifi, for better uptime than your regular phone.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    What would be really cool is if we could easily share hosting burden of m sites on n devices. As an alternative to paying a subscription fee for some service, you could instead just have your hardware do enough compute/storage to offset your usage.
    - codersfocus 3y ago
      That exists, IPFS
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        I know that people can use IPFS to voluntarily pin data so that it is redundantly hosted, but supposing there's some paid service that goes with that data, I don't think IPFS helps identify the users that have been pinning the data so that you can offer them the service for free. In theory the users could just mine filecoin and pay for the service in that, and then I could dispatch storage contracts to the users in ways that ensure that the entire dataset stays pinned, but so far as I know that's not built in. Besides, a spare phone isn't up to the task of mining filecoin (you need a pretty beefy rig). I think it would be cheaper and simpler to keep the "have you pinned enough data to justify a free premium account?" Logic all together in one place and not introduce the mining process as an intermediary, but not so cheap and simple that every app that does it should have to implement it themselves.

renonce 3y ago

How can a mobile phone's network be as stable as that of a datacenter? Without that stability it's not going to be practically useful.

sk0g 3y ago
I guess a caching layer could help, like CloudFlare's DDoS protection that still tries to serve a page if a cached version exists. At that point I'm not sure if it's functionally different to syncing markdown files to something like S3 or GitHub pages.
- cryptonym 3y ago
  Only works if the content is popular in your region and you are only half-self-hosting.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > I guess a caching layer could help In practice this works only for trivial apps, that have no dynamic content, don't serve large files, don't see a lot of traffic, doesn't come from all over the world (each PoP has a separate cache), etc. CDN caching is opportunistic, most services assume server-grade hardware at the origin that can take some "warmup" load on its own. Also if you're introducing a third-party CDN/cache, you're already throwing away a whole bunch of reasons for self-hosting in the first place.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    In practice this works only for trivial apps, that have no dynamic content, don't serve large files, don't see a lot of traffic, doesn't come from all over the world (each PoP has a separate cache), etc. So something exactly like a blog then.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      True, but this means your solution is competing with Github pages, Netlify, etc. and your visitors are still subject to the whim of the caching layer. I'm not aware of any classical CDN product that works Great even when the origin server doesn't. Building a CDN for that purpose only would be extremely niche - generic CDNs with a hand-tuned caching policy are great at many other things, such as live video delivery, so you'd be building a non-generic CDN in a saturated market. Then the question of how does the CDN make itself aware of the content it needs to prefetch... once you devolve into that, well you've reinvented git push to Netlify, but with 10x the amount of quirks, oddball architecture, and less flexibility.
  - account42 3y ago
    > apps Make websites not apps.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      If you're building something as complex and convoluted as a blog hosted on a smartphone being tunnelled to the outside world and proxied through a purpose-built CDN, I don't think you can call it a website anymore. I do agree, let's build websites instead.
- opan 3y ago
  Please (everyone), stop pushing cloudflare on to everyone.
  - sk0g 3y ago
    I'm not pushing anything, just haven't seen pass-through proxy that has a similar failure mechanism for when websites are down. They have enough of a market share without me promoting them anyway.
    - cryptonym 3y ago
      That's a feature of basically any CDN and some existed well before Cloudflare entered the market. Nowadays you find dozen of CDNs. A personal site may be fine without it. If your plan is having an offline version ready to be served, as you expect a lot of downtime, distributed cache might not be the best architecture. Some CDN offer a dedicated layer of cache in front of your origin, but that sounds overkill for a personal blog.
NoGravitas 3y ago
Personal sites don't really need the kind of network stability we've come to expect. It would also be nice to see a move to more offline-tolerant networks for a lot of things.
- guessbest 3y ago
  You know what is offline-tolerant? NNTP and email.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    >> You know what is offline-tolerant? NNTP and email. Imagine a distributed social network where updates come via email. Updates are identified by the email client (or other) and automatically sent to whatever program needs to process them. You end up with a local copy of everyones stuff that is kept for a period of time.
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      I have been working on idea for generic store-and-forward messaging. Basically, email for everything. The idea is that store-and-forward is more reliable when there are limited or no network. It would also work well for interplanetary communication. For some applictions, it is simple to fallback or use always and luckily the basics are included. Unfortunately, lots of applications won't work at all and many would have to be rewritten.
      - rakoo 3y ago
        You're probably aware of http://www.nncpgo.org/ http://www.nncpgo.org/ then
        Fnoord 3y ago
        Why is this website hosted in Russia (given current geopolitics), and why does this website have a certificate issued by ca.cypherpunks.ru instead of say Let's Encrypt?
Ajedi32 3y ago
I would envision something like this being used with an older phone permanently connected to a charger and Wi-Fi or possibly a USB docking station with Ethernet, not running on your personal phone over mobile data. The latter would be terrible for battery life.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chrnola 3y ago

I was kicking around a similar idea a few months ago but for a single-user Mastodon instance. Obviously a phone is a huge single point of failure, but there are likely dozens of hobbyist use-cases like this that don’t need strong reliability guarantees.

pier25 3y ago

> This is essentially my vision of the future of selfhosting What if you lose connectivity? What if you run out of battery? What if your phone breaks for some reason? For a blog I really don't see the advantage compared to a free static host.

onion2k 3y ago
99% of the challenge in running a blog is authoring posts. Serving the content is trivial. If using an app improves writing stuff it's a win.

ilyt 3y ago

being accessible 24/7 would burn battery like mofo tho.

Volundr 3y ago

You know, I read this and got exciting thinking "I could build that!". Then I got to thinking about the security implications of running a webserver on a personal phone exposed to the internet. I think I'll pass.

kibwen 3y ago
It doesn't need to be a personal phone. If you get a new phone, you could do a factory reset on your old phone and use it as a webserver in this way. And since you aren't taking it with you anywhere, you can leave it at home plugged in and on wifi, for better uptime than your regular phone.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  What would be really cool is if we could easily share hosting burden of m sites on n devices. As an alternative to paying a subscription fee for some service, you could instead just have your hardware do enough compute/storage to offset your usage.
  - codersfocus 3y ago
    That exists, IPFS
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      I know that people can use IPFS to voluntarily pin data so that it is redundantly hosted, but supposing there's some paid service that goes with that data, I don't think IPFS helps identify the users that have been pinning the data so that you can offer them the service for free. In theory the users could just mine filecoin and pay for the service in that, and then I could dispatch storage contracts to the users in ways that ensure that the entire dataset stays pinned, but so far as I know that's not built in. Besides, a spare phone isn't up to the task of mining filecoin (you need a pretty beefy rig). I think it would be cheaper and simpler to keep the "have you pinned enough data to justify a free premium account?" Logic all together in one place and not introduce the mining process as an intermediary, but not so cheap and simple that every app that does it should have to implement it themselves.