18 ms·

Every phone should be able to run personal websites

• chixq 3y ago
  Using Samsung S22U, setup my own site by the help of termux x11 + termux proot-distros ubuntu, and halo(and open-source cms) Found that Samsung Dex mode with termux x11 (ubuntu) inside is so native and smooth.
• janandonly 3y ago
  Limited data plans and connectivity issues make this infeasible. Also security issues on having incoming ports open, of course. But what if instead of hosting an index.html file over HTTP(S) we could all host via BitTorrent? A website could be a bunch of files that are referred to by a DHT hash file. That way everybody who visits the website will also temporarily support the site by hosting it. If your self hosted site is Slashdotted/HNewsed than hosting would still not fail: after all, all the new visitors are temporarily also seeders of the file over BitTorrent.
  • yownie 3y ago
    there were some projects that explored this actually one which was called chord. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28peer-to-peer%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28peer-to-peer%29?wprov...
  • predictabl3 3y ago
    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.
    • amelius 3y ago
      What does Rust have to do with it?!?
      • predictabl3 3y ago
        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.
        • amelius 3y ago
          > It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ...
          • predictabl3 3y ago
            And yet, it's not the first or last project to choose to build a base SDK in Rust and provide bindings on top. And an effort being taken by a company quickly trying to iterate, build a polished product, and bring revenue in on the edges. And you can already look at various projects and see the positive impacts. I'd elaborate on why, but we've all heard it a thousand times and the folks that don't want to believe anything they hear about Rust still won't hear it.
    • jeroenhd 3y ago
      I don't see why they'd need to rebuild IPFS in Rust. Go is plenty fast. The problem is that the current IPFS network and design just don't scale very well.
      • anacrolix 3y ago
        This is correct. Go is more than adequate for this but IPFS has architectural issues.
  • anacrolix 3y ago
    I implemented exactly this in https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink. It works fantastically well. Unfortunately I couldn't get any funding from OTF or similar, and nobody is commercially interested in making websites easy to host and scale.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  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 mobile way, are a terrible idea.
  • LrnByTeach 3y ago
    To account for the changing times, I believe a Personal LLM should be running on your phone (with a cloud data backup) with background AGENTS looking for shopping deals, working with your calendar and making appointments for all life chores such as your car oil change appointment bookings, recommending preventive maintenance repairs, answering on your demand questions on your your kids math/english report cards grade progress for last few semesters, and so on.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    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 why that should be. It's not as it Android and iOS come with important http(s) servers out of the box, why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps?
    • FireInsight 3y ago
      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.
      • nulld3v 3y ago
        Apps can already do this mostly and it's caused absolutely no issues. In fact, it's often used for ad-blocking. You just can't bind to port 80/443.
• izzydata 3y ago
  I agree that they should be capable, but I don't think it should be done by almost anyone.
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  Any phone can run an onion service if all you need is a website. It's rather annoying that you need to root/jailbreak your phone to use port 80 I agree with that, but it's also not a necessity for running a website. Aside from the phone use case, the concept of "privileged ports" is pretty silly on any device operated by a single user or used for a single purpose. In an age where any device on a modern network can reserve hundreds of IP addresses without any risk of address space exhaustion, concepts such as reserved ports are next to useless. One day I'll get myself to waste a few weeks writing an Android mod that gives every app on the system a separate (ephemeral) IPv6 address. The challenge will be to generate enough virtual interfaces for network namespacing to do its thing while assuring it only does so on IPv6 enabled WiFi networks, but I think it can be done.
• sho_hn 3y ago
  On my Nokia N90i, I used to run Apache and PHP and a gallery web app to serve up the phone's camera roll on the wifi interface. Was quite useful at times. Symbian was a terribly quirky platform to develop for, but there were some quite cool things.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    You still can on modern phones: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-services https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-services You'll have to use port 8080 or some other high port number because of privileged ports, but for just temporarily sharing your camera roll that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
    • sho_hn 3y ago
      Yup, I love Termux. It's what makes my Android phone useful as a tool.
      • kanbara 3y ago
        really? my phone is useful as a tool to: communicate with friends and family, do work via writing, reading, checking metrics, watching videos, and 10000 other things. and i live in vim on a computer. this tech-centric “i need a terminal and full access to the shell for it to have any worth” is pretty juvenile. phones are real tools for millions of people— the greatest technological innovation of the century.
        • sho_hn 3y ago
          From a dictionary, on the noun "tool": "something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession" I was likening it to something like a screwdriver. I often describe what we do as making tools for others to live their lives and spread culture and civilization, so I understand your sentiment (although I think you are grandstanding a little). My comment, however, was personal and about what makes something a tool for me. I'm also a fan of what phones do for people, and software in general; one of my fondest times working in software was developing communication/chat software and knowing a number of people who met on it and became partners for life.
• necrophcodr 3y ago
  The article doesn't make sense. It can technically work with a bunch of dynamic DNS systems. An IPv6 address isn't fixed to your device like a MAC address is. Even assuming it would be doable, it would be a security nightmare, and we'd end up relying on some centralised systems anyway lest we burden the internet with absolutely insane amounts of continual p2p discoveries. If you want a personal website, why not use a service like neocities? It's free, and just lets you go ham with static content. Don't feel like writing HTML pages manually? Make a TiddlyWiki and upload that.
  • necrophcodr 3y ago
    To be clear, I am all for self hosting stuff, but it needs to be in a proper, affordable, standardized package that can be kept secure and useful. A phone is NOT that.
    • jeroenhd 3y ago
      Why not? I download updates to apps on my phone every day. I fact, my old phone that has long stopped receiving updates still runs the latest browsers just fine. The problem isn't keeping the applications up to date. There's a risk of kernel exploits, but I can't remember the last time the Android kernel had a bug that could be triggered by simply sending packets to it. Privilege escalation works, maybe, but getting root on Android is a lot harder than most Linux servers because of the very strict and isolated SELinux contexts. I've installed termux on my phone and I can install nginx with a single command. Downloading a Debian chroot and launching a full, maintained Linux distro is two commands away. Until remotely triggered Android kernel exploits become a thing, I don't think the updates are the problem here.
      • mappu 3y ago
        > I can't remember the last time the Android kernel had a bug that could be triggered by simply sending packets to it. RCE from Bluetooth packets has happened uncomfortably often - CVE-2017-0781+2 (BlueBorne), CVE-2020-0022, CVE-2022-20411, ...
• GavinAnderegg 3y ago
  > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. I sympathize with this, but disagree. There are a lot a great free options for hosting a website. I personally use GitHub Pages, but Netlify, Vercel, and even Glitch offer excellent free tiers. Heck, if you just want to put some words on the web, WordPress.com offers free blog hosting. All of these options are using someone else's service, and that may go away without notice. I understand some people wouldn't prefer that. But on the other hand, I value my phone's battery and site's availability over owning the full stack.
  • gsatic 3y ago
    Why is phone battery going to die? Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its handling for all your personal data from every app installed.
    • saagarjha 3y ago
      It’s only doing that intermittently when you’re not interacting with the device.
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        Depends on the app and what permissions you set
      • nwoli 3y ago
        If you’re getting more than a thousand requests a day you’re gonna move to a real web host anyway
        • GavinAnderegg 3y ago
          My blog has been on the front page of Hacker News a couple of times with GitHub Pages. It didn't break a sweat.
          • 3y ago
• ttoinou 3y ago
  This is looking like a solution in search of a problem
• powera 3y ago
  Just 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".
  • 7373737373 3y ago
    But you are telling people NOT to do this, from the get go, without giving a reason?
    • jonbell 3y ago
      This entire thread should be saved in the Smithsonian. It’s the most epic bikeshedding about the stupidest idea, with people emotionally tying it to their pet peeves. Capitalism! Walled gardens! Free software! No, it’s just a bad idea because few people want it, and even if you did want it, you can, and even then it open a up issues of battery life, reliability, etc. we can barely get actual software makers to care about personal websites, let alone normal people. And then we want to argue people should be able to host on their phones? Good gravy.
      • 7373737373 3y ago
        Who are you to say what people want? Why limit your imagination? Why not think about the possibilities first? Why presume that things must be difficult?
        • koolala 3y ago
          I'm so excited to use a spatial computer (a mobile VR headset computer) that can connect to my phone with my friends. We can host and create AR apps like that.
• Knee_Pain 3y ago
  [dead]
• hyperific 3y ago
  I 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-server-on-android https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-...
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > 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.
  • ip26 3y ago
    I think it’s axiomatic that an order of magnitude more time will be spent on consuming content than producing it. Why would you spend hours every day crafting a deeply insightful blog if literally no one ever read it? As an author or other content producer, you want people to consume your work. Therefore, the equilibrium between content and consumption must settle on dramatically more consumption than production. I think this handily explains why the “personal website for every human” utopia never came to pass. (Yes, I know some people will produce great content purely for the joy of doing it, and don’t care if anyone consumes it. I think that’s an edge case, not the operandus of every living person) P.S. You’re completely right about the $5-7/mo hosting. I used to run a server in my home, but discovered I was spending more on electricity than the cost of leasing a small VPS. Centralizing has fantastic economies of scale.
  • bandergirl 3y ago
    $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
• mishagale 3y ago
  On the same basis, most home routers are powerful enough to run a basic webserver, and they are much more likely to have a consistent internet connection. They probably aren't behind CG-NAT, and most of them have Dynamic DNS support even if they don't have a static IP.
  • bdavbdav 3y ago
    Exactly - I have a drawer full of consumer electronics which could be hacked to better run a web server than my iPhone.
• notnmeyer 3y ago
  sorry i missed your call i was being ddos’d
  • tristanbvk 3y ago
    Hilarious
• bofaGuy 3y ago
  You can run a flask web server from your iPhone using Pythonista and StaSh. I’m not sure about port 80 though. Pythonista: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1085978097 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1085978097 StaSh: https://github.com/ywangd/stash https://github.com/ywangd/stash
• giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I disagree with this, but it is possible with one of those Linux shell emulators for Android, I forget if I tried it on iOS, but I've managed to do it both via Python and Golang.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    Without root access you're not going to be able to use port 80 or port 443 on Android. I don't think iOS has the same restriction, but I can't find any documentation about it so I'm not sure.
    • giancarlostoro 3y ago
      Not sure what port I used and I wasnt trying to use my mobile IP either, probably just used 8080.
    • flangola7 3y ago
      Why would you need root access for the most common posts on the internet?
      • giancarlostoro 3y ago
        Not to access them on other systems, but to listen on them.
        • flangola7 3y ago
          That doesn't change my question.
• Espionage724 3y ago
  What's stopping anyone today with Android from installing Termux, proot, a distro of their choice, and then hosting a webserver?
  • Groxx 3y ago
    Port 80 / 443 privileges at the device's networking level, mostly. If you don't need those there are indeed plenty of options (e.g. hosting onion sites works fine).
• notatoad 3y ago
  hosting a website properly just isn't that difficult or expensive. if somebody wants to have a website, they can. there's plenty of free options that don't involve a device that has intermittent connectivity, runs off a battery, and that you probably don't want to enable remote access to for security reasons. the reason people don't set up personal websites is that they don't want to. not becauase they can't host it. facebook does a better job of serving the "personal website" niche than personal websites do. the dream of every person having their own website is a thing that tech nerds want from others, not a thing that most people want for themselves
  • indymike 3y ago
    > there's plenty of free options that don't involve a device that has intermittent connectivity, runs off a battery, I have a great reason to host a website on my phone. I want to. It's my phone. I'm paying for the service. You can do what you want with your phone, but please, don't tell me what I can and can't do with my property.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• tristanbvk 3y ago
  I actually agree with the logic. Not necessarily on a phone you take out but an average Android phone running Linux should be able to do this. You can have a very usable web server and have custody over your own data/website. Couple it with a Wireguard VPN to an IPv6 tunnel broker and you're golden.
• mattxxx 3y ago
  I really like this in a cyberpunk-kind-of-way, but think it's impractical from a data usage perspective + the fact that your ip should change frequently on any mobile device. In the abstract, I feel like editing a file on your phone vs. editing a file somewhere "in the cloud" isn't so different if the interface makes it indistinguishable, so I don't know if you get any real benefit to toting around your webserver... but I like the notion of a homegrown, self-managed webserver that you keep in your pocket.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  And everybody should be able to eat a diet of mostly candy, smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, and stand outside in the sun as long as they want. But it's not a good idea, for reasons.
• DanAtC 3y ago
  iOS can with some caveats https://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id1623006812 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068...
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  You really don't want your phone's radio activating to serve random http requests, most of which are probably going to be bots, and people loading websites really don't want to wait for the latency that would be involved with your phone serving web requests.
  • Moldoteck 3y ago
    Don't use the feature then, no? Just like ppl that want pristine google play experience will not use sideloading
• nonameiguess 3y ago
  This makes no sense. > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. The privilege of self hosting that early Internet users enjoyed was never given to the new Internet users. If you actually have the technical chops to self-host a personal website in your house, why on earth would you want to do it on a phone? A Pi, Nano, Jetson, NUC, any kind of small form-factor mini PC is a far cheaper and better option if the limiter is seriously that you can't afford a hosting service. A web server does not need a camera, a touchscreen, a gyroscope, a GPS chip, a radio transceiver, an accelerometer, a fingerprint reader, or any of the many other hardware features that cause a phone to cost so much. You may as well ask why your thermostat, printer, microwave, smart lightbulb, or television can't run a web server. There is nothing technologically stopping them. If they can run a stored program and connect to a network, they can bind to a port and listen for incoming requests. But running a website on them just isn't the purpose for their existence. General purpose computing devices exist and are cheap. If you want one, get one. There is no reason every single device that can do any form of computing needs to be a fully general-purpose computing device.
• Lukkaroinen 3y ago
  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-server-on-android https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-...
• Koala_ice 3y ago
  I know it’s not a phone, but a few friends and I built this for the Newton MessagePad back in 1998-9 with exactly this vision. Ref: http://npds.free.fr/ http://npds.free.fr/
• nologic01 3y ago
  Unlocking the smartphone will be a singular event in computing history. Running a personal website is a metaphor for actually using the device fully and with agency. It cannot not happen. The drivers are the ever increasing commoditisation of quality hardware, the slow but steady maturity of open source software and the fact that it takes machination at planetary scale to prevent it from happening (ie keeping these ever more powerful devices locked for scrolling down social). Ofcourse the timing and manner the revolution will happen is unpredictable.
  • ilyt 3y ago
    Uh, you know phones can be rooted since the smartphone revolution, right ?
  • fsflover 3y ago
    > Unlocking the smartphone will be a singular event in computing history > It cannot not happen It has already happened: GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, are already available.
    • nologic01 3y ago
      I was thinking of slightly wider adoption, but the proof-of-principle is indeed already here. Demonstrating that this freedom offers radical new opportunities (the infamous killer apps) is not yet done though. We need to think outside the confines that locked down devices have forced us to think. Swarms of mobiles acting as both clients and servers are a new unexplored territory.
• ivanmontillam 3y ago
  I support this idea as well. I remember toying with Bit Web Server (LAMP stack) on my Galaxy S3 about 10 years ago, and I also remember running Tor on my smartphone (and it could run as a proxy pass server for an .onion site). I fantasized with the idea that if I was a crime lord, that's how I'd have my website. Police raid? Nope, I'm on the go as long as I have my shiny EDGE connection! I never finished the proof of concept setup to do it, but I know I could have done it.
• raarts 3y ago
  How about: every internet router should have 10TB of space for household member data and an API to request personal details like medical data. May soon be commercially viable.
  • giantrobot 3y ago
    The "S" in IoT stands for security. A bunch of file servers inadvertently connected to the Internet isn't the best idea. Leaked personal data and botnets will just be the start of the problems.
• dtx1 3y ago
  No! The reality is that the vast majority of phone users don't want or need this and are better off with such abilities disabled. If you want to run your own low powered server use a raspberry pi. People have their banking credentials, most of their personal life, their most private images on these devices and most of the people using phones can barely handle the complexity they already involve. I'm all for allowing people to use their devices as they chose but there's a certain level of compromise that anyone should see is reasonable when it comes to phones.
• butz 3y ago
  Let's go deeper: website is hosted on your phone, but visitor has to call your phone number to access it, using a dial-up modem.
  • lightedman 3y ago
    Mobile BBS!
  • thepostman0 3y ago
    Would be cool if spam callers had to complete a door game before getting put through
• petabytes 3y ago
  I remember running a server on an old tablet several years ago, it was awful. You would have to deal with the server not automatically starting up, not to mention the battery eventually failing and expanding.
• cramjabsyn 3y ago
  A linux distro targeting old apple handsets would be excellent for this. Even it only EOL devices were supported itd still be very useful to have a lightweight arm server with battery backup.
• mgraczyk 3y ago
  Sorry but the claim in this article is not correct (on Android) and is proposing a bad solution to the problem you're trying to solve. First, nobody is stopping you from doing this. I just spent 30 seconds installing the first app I found on the Play store and 1 minute configuring my router, and now I have a static web server that I can hit from anywhere in the world. But the real issue is that it's the wrong way to build a personal web server for your phone. The right way to do this is to host a server in a datacenter and install an app or service that pushes content to that server. Other users can hit that server to see that data you push. Tons of advantages of doing it this way (reliability, battery life, capability, throughput, cost, security, support for multiple devices, support for multiple kinds of devices, ...) The reason that people don't build things like this isn't because they are evil or protecting their "walled gardens", it's just a bad design.
• paxys 3y ago
  > 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 more cost effective (and reliable/performant) to buy a $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi than rely on a device and network connection that aren't meant to be used for web hosting. Cell phones have limited battery life. Mobile network connections are spotty, and they allocate the vast majority of bandwidth for downloads because that's what people are using their devices for. So the ecosystem doesn't support running websites on mobile devices because (1) it is a terrible idea, (2) the demand is non-existent and (3) there are a hundred better options.
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    Personal website hosting is 100% free from many, many vendors.
  • anderspitman 3y ago
    > 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.
    • solardev 3y ago
      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.
      • Nathan2055 3y ago
        > 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-rss-social https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...
• tonetheman 3y ago
  [dead]
• fsociety 3y ago
  I would much rather have a locked down phone which is secure, as I rely on it for many important functions in my life. I’ll leave the cheap web servers to a Raspberry Pi, CDN, or VPS thank you very much.
  • t0mas88 3y ago
    I used to be a big Android advocate years ago when I wrote a lot of code myself. Now I prefer a locked down iPhone that always works at maybe a bit higher cost. It feels like many more people have gone through that switch. Even though I'm not idealistically aligned with the locked down App Store approach Apple takes, their ecosystem just works well for my needs.
    • Moldoteck 3y ago
      Soon ios will allow sideload, so not sure if www server will be a problem then
• sys_64738 3y ago
  Just what we'd need - a new security attack vector :rolleyes emoji:
• zensayyy 3y ago
  > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites What? You can host a personal website for free. People are just not interested in it
• anotherhue 3y ago
  There's a perfectly cromulent Wordpress app, and no doubt equivalents for less wizened personal platforms.
• graypegg 3y ago
  I’ll give you that this isn’t a half bad idea to give someone that spark of interest early on. A phone is a lot harder to mess with, in ways that I think a lot of people older than 20 did when they were kids to their PCs. However, a server is such a specific + utilitarian thing. And on a phone it really serves very little utility. Some kid would get a kick out of making a website their friends can visit, but beyond that, not being able to run a server is more a symptom of how locked-down and uninspired phone OSes are, rather than a thing that specifically NEEDS to be implemented.
• anderspitman 3y ago
  I'm a big proponent of this idea. Unfortunately IPv6 alone isn't enough, due to firewalls. It's just not realistic for the average person to be expected to set up port forwarding etc. Now, if something like UPnP was universally deployed alongside IPv6, that would pretty much do it. Personally, I think the future of self hosting is going to happen through IPv4 tunnels[0] with SNI routing. You also get the added benefit of not exposing your actual IP address, and dealing with things like DDoS become the tunnel provider's concern. [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
• paulcarroty 3y ago
  Well, https://github.com/kiwix https://github.com/kiwix is designed for something like this tho.
• gmerc 3y ago
  Everyone is on limited mobile data. The end.
• madacol 3y ago
  A bigger reason we should be able to run websites on our phones is to run decentralized or local-first web apps, but this requires also solving that our phones' network become accessible (e.g. implement Ipv6, but preferably bootstrap some fancy mesh network on-the-fly) We should be chatting p2p through wifi/bluetooth by just letting our friends scan a QR code that links to our phone's web server that serves a p2p client for real-time chat in the middle of the jungle In that same way, we should be playing games, take notes, run fair micro elections / lotteries, and hundreds of other coordination apps
• 7e 3y ago
  A phone costs hundreds of dollars. A Raspberry Pi costs $50 and does the job 100x better.
  • wruza 3y ago
    https://letanphuc.net/2017/08/this-blog-is-now-running-on-an-orange-pi/amp/ https://letanphuc.net/2017/08/this-blog-is-now-running-on-an...
  • 7373737373 3y ago
    I hate it when people propose "just" getting another piece of hardware, be it for wireless connectivity, routing, internet/ad filtering, data and web hosting etc. etc. WHY must people again and again insist on this? This is not the way for 99.999% of people Why not insist on extending the abilities and security of the one device 99.999% of people already have, before insisting on the acquisition of another, special-purpose device, requiring its own intricate setup and maintenance and power and space and connectivity? I just don't get it.
• divyenduz 3y ago
  Sounds like a good use case for TailScale funnel. Not sure if this is possible today but can work via that route.
• rco8786 3y ago
  Seems like this has a lot more to do with limited bandwidth than with server compute power.
• nixpulvis 3y ago
  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.
• circuit 3y ago
  > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. "For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1] Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting? [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
  • vorticalbox 3y ago
    You can run a static site on github.com for free.
    • stcroixx 3y ago
      Surely without any content restrictions or consequences to the account.
      • thenickdude 3y ago
        Do you imagine these restrictions disappear when you host content using your cell provider? They have acceptable use and abuse policies too.
  • opportune 3y ago
    Micropayments aren’t more of a thing already for a reason. There is friction and overhead with signing up for a 3P subscription service even if the actual dollar cost is negligible.
    • smallerfish 3y ago
      The reason is high credit card fees. If payment gateways allowed micropayments they'd be more popular. (Square, for example, charges 31-33c on anything under $1.)
      • MisterSandman 3y ago
• phyzome 3y ago
  A free, ancient laptop off of Craigslist would work better.
• ianburrell 3y ago
  I think the problem with this idea is using it to host a personal website. There are so many other ways to host personal website that are better. I think hosting services for Internet doesn't make sense, but does for local network. I have thought how could have disaster response server on local network. Instead of Raspberry Pi with battery, could have phone which is has own battery, and more likely to have one available.
• dt3ft 3y ago
  This could work. If the site is down, the phone is off or in a tunnel. Try again later, nothing wrong with that.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  With respect to the idea of hosting personal websites without using hosting companies, why does it have to be port 80. Port 80 is what commercial hosting uses, but this proposal is fundamentally different from commercial hosting. I'm not sure I understand why using an agreed-upon high port would not be an acceptable alternative. As for non-rooted Android not allowing use of port 80, this is just one symptom of the larger problem of not allowing the computer owner to have root privileges. And letting an advertising company have them instead. IMHO. Unrelated perhaps but it is possible to forward port 80 in Android. For example, I forward tcp/80 to a computer running NetBSD. This can be done using an app, e.g., NetGuard. TLS zealots might want to try this sometime and observe some of the unencrypted egress traffic. Thought experiment: Imagine you make a salary or other financial gains by applying what you know in the subject matter area of X. Someone comes along and proposes that they want to teach more people about how X works. What is the likelihood you will respond with something like "no one really wants to know how X works". You want to maintain the status quo because you understand that an information asymmetry between people who understand how X works and those who do not must exist in order that you may continue to be paid for or otherwise profit from your knowledge.
  • sillysaurusx 3y ago
    I saw some statistics showing that the majority of people in the US don't even have broadband (speed) internet, let alone a second computer. Here's an uncomfortable thought: The modern day personal website is someone's tiktok profile page. And it's thanks to the fact that everyone has a phone, and tiktok just works. There's an opportunity to learn from this model, though I'm not sure what the lesson is.
    • dfc 3y ago
      I don't think you saw those statistics in the last decade. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
      • sillysaurusx 3y ago
• mulmen 3y ago
  If it was lan/wifi/bluetooth/local only then I could see it being kinda neat. Could have a little personal profile page for the people in your immediate vicinity. Could even update it by location. Like a kind of hyperlocal Tinder. But if this is a WWW page doesn’t it open up individuals to D/DoS attacks? What happens when an angry ex nukes your battery on a Saturday night? I don’t see why hosting from a phone should (or even could) be a thing. The article doesn’t convincingly establish why phone hosting is important. If it’s a cost issue then wouldn’t it be a competitive loss-leader for an ISP add-on like we had in the past? ISPs used to provide web hosting, email, newsgroups, etc. Those all went away in favor of dedicated providers, which seems like a better model.
  • albuic 3y ago
    I have always thought that we need a way to add firewall rules on ISP side so that we can block abuse at the origin without impacting the last device.
    • mulmen 3y ago
      No thanks. ISPs have proven to not be trustworthy. What you are describing is a proxy like Cloudflare who you pay specifically to prevent abuse through your domain. I want a firewall from my ISP about as much as I want a carwash from my public utilities.
  • Moldoteck 3y ago
    But if this is a WWW page doesn’t it open up individuals to D/DoS attacks- don't use it then, just like when ppl don't use sideload and the feature is locked unless they allow it
• WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > All we need is IPv6 connectivity everywhere and phone operating systems optimized to run web servers. Unless you're relegated to IPv6-Never ISPs (eg:Frontier) which doesn't matter to IPv6 advocates because IPv6 is already awesome! and everywhere that counts!
• devnullbrain 3y ago
  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.
  • ehutch79 3y ago
    Uh, it’s not personal websites we’re talking about. It’s hosting them on public facing servers on your phone specifically
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      "Personal website" doesn't mean and has never meant that you're the only person who can see it.
      • ehutch79 3y ago
        Generally no, and i don't think anyone was thinking we were talking about sites that only the writer sees? Otherwise what's the point of running a server?
  • goodbyesf 3y ago
    > It's very sad that a forum of self-styled hackers can not see the value in a personal website. I think the name has you confused. The vast majority of people here are not self-styled hackers. Actually most are against hackers and the hacker ethos. Just because north korea calls itself the democratic people's republic of korea doesn't mean it is democratic or a republic. The same applies here. > Our image of what the web is and should be has been poisoned by 99.999% uptime cloud-hosted tat. No. It's been poisoned by greed and power.
  • cortesoft 3y ago
    The problem isn't the self hosting a website bit, it is the "oh your phone" bit. Our phone network doesn't have a ton of excess capacity, and building it out is expensive. A personal website has zero reason to run on your phone with you. It would be way more efficient for the phone companies to simply give a free small VPS to phone customers who want one rather than allow them to host it on their phone.
• joecool1029 3y ago
  It's not running on the phone but it's a personal static website behind a phone. I run a small weather station page I can access anywhere from my house which is on LTE/NR. LineageOS is on my phone and it does not block inbound connections to routed ipv6 addresses on T-Mobile (US). ipv4 goes through a CGNAT. Weather station is running weewx on a raspberrypi connected via wifi hotspot to the phone. To handle the issue of ipv6 addresses changing frequently (daily?) I have ddclient update my AAAA record to my domain on cloudflare. I don't set a A record. Then cloudflare just proxies any ipv4 traffic to the ipv6 address so anyone with my URL can load the page.
• WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  In case you were wondering what Nokia's Mobile Web Service looked like. http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Previewing_Nokias_Mobile_Web_Server.php http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Previewing_Noki... https://jpmens.net/2007/05/03/mobile-web-server-apache-on-a-s60-phone-nokia-n70/ https://jpmens.net/2007/05/03/mobile-web-server-apache-on-a-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web_Server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web_Server Heyday: https://web.archive.org/web/20090214014049/https://mymobilesite.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090214014049/https://mymobiles... 2010 Goodbye (via redirect): https://web.archive.org/web/20100621023623/http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog/2010/01/12/mobile-web-server-beta-archived https://web.archive.org/web/20100621023623/http://betalabs.n...
• aspyct 3y ago
  One word: battery.
  • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    Data cap too
• kgbcia 3y ago
  Honestly, it sounds fun until your IP address is shown to the world. With the potential for people to hack it. For some of us, we have alot of personal and financial data on our phones. I prefer paying five dollars a month to a webhost shared servwe, that has a load balancer, updates the software, backups, etc
• retrocryptid 3y ago
  For the love of christ, no. What is the problem you're trying to solve? Is twitter... er... I mean X not unreliable enough for you? Imagine someone depending on a resource that's on a device that moves in and out of service as you lose coverage or have to reboot to get bluetooth pairing to work right. And what if you wanted to support TLS. Try explaining to normal people why they're getting security warnings because your CARRIER doesn't support dynamic DNS so your cert SN or SAN doesn't match your FQDN. And proxies. I don't even want to think what carrier data teams will do to proxy requests. I really like the idea of a carrier / manufacturer neutral protocol to get data (pictures, contact vCard, call logs, music, etc.) on and off a phone. But it's not HTTP(S).
• wizardforhire 3y ago
  Hear me out… after reading the comments and seeing the multitude of innumerable issues with this idea despite its impetus as a solution to obvious societal problems, here is one possible way to approach solving the problem… given the scale, scope and complexity of the issue/s this is in no way a complete nor exhaustive plausible solution… Rather than the phone hosting the website, the service hosting the backup of the phone should act as the webserver. Would solve uptime, and security. To solve the webhosting hostage situation will require an act of congress to make phone providers and manufacturers liable for loss of data for the phones complete with fixed rates for hosting. The act should also stipulate that webhosting with open standard api and servers is an absolute non-negotiable necessity subject to substantial penalties for failure to comply…. Seems harsh but it would cause an open market of third party sites to provide for the offloading / hosting / storage responsibilities while usurping the walled garden strangled hold. In addition would open up a huge search industry where the ticktock/ instagrams of the worlds are reduced to search algorithms rather than divine dictatorships.
• jonplackett 3y ago
  Even if you want to run a website on your phone (seems pointless…) Wouldn’t you need some kind of ngrok service to allow it to be accessible from the wider internet? In which case you could use whatever port you want and forward. But then you’re kinda using a host aren’t you… and you may as well just cache it…
  • ghoshbishakh 3y ago
    https://androidblog.a.pinggy.io/ https://androidblog.a.pinggy.io/
• koolala 3y ago
  This is so important to me too! Thank you everyone for fighting for this!
• superkuh 3y ago
  Disregard phones, they're terrible computers with terrible networking. Everyone should run a personal website on their computer at home.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  Would be great. Might need educated lawmakers to coerce network providers into providing symmetrical network capacity. See also content-centric networking, IPFS, Freenet 2023, etc.
• richardw 3y ago
  I’ve been thinking on and off about personal hosting. Not just for web, for everything that I want hosted. Eg data, address, location, permissions to message me or mail me or read some of my photos or all the functionality we give up to the cloud overlords. I don’t want it on my device. Battery, connectivity and uptime aren’t suited to hosting. But it should be something I can delegate to a service (or set of services) and only care about the hosting details of if I want to. Problem is, every time I see anything on decentralised identity or hosting, it ends up as an unusable dogs breakfast. We’re not there yet, but it’s worth pondering as a possible future.
• otterpro 3y ago
  I have several old phones that are about to become e-waste, but I'd love to use these old hardware to host my website or blogs at home. They are powerful enough (mostly ARM processor like Raspberry pi) and they have very low power usage.
• eternityforest 3y ago
  I don't think anything personal should be on port 80. Too much work! What I think we really need is more stuff like ngrok and cloudflare tunnels, in easier to use form. If it has to go through centralized infrastructure anyway, I'd rather someone else process all the traffic first, maybe even keep DoSes out, handle the SSL, etc. If self hosting is ever going to be a thing again, I think we either need that, or full P2P(I've written before about why we need to have something like .onion service URLs but without the anonymity, and even used a DIY implementation of the idea for a while). But at the moment, without adding anything new to browsers, hosting through a cloud portal seems to be the most practical.
  • PLG88 3y ago
    Lots of alternatives to Ngrok and Cloudflare - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling. What we need is more open source and permissives ones which are well maintained and easy to use. fwiw, I work on one in the list called zrok.io, its open source and we have a free SaaS version. I dont think (as the author suggests) that IPv6 everywhere is happening anytime soon.
    • eternityforest 3y ago
      I'd seen some of these but Zrok is new to me and looks like one of the best!! > The private share is identified by a share token. The accessing user will use the share token, along with the zrok access command to create a local endpoint on their system, which lets them use the shared resource as if it were local to their system. That's really awesome both in terms of function and documentation. Clear and concise about exactly what it's going to do, and exactly the functionality I was hoping to see, especially in something that also has a SaaS web portal. Will there ever be an Android client? I always thought that what the IoT really needs is some way to just plug in your IoT thing to Ethernet, scan a code on its crappy little LCD, and have them instantly paired. It looks like OpenZiti doesn't do P2P yet but they're thinking about it? That will definitely be a big deal, but at the moment it seems like it's already 100% ready for the use case of doing a personal site.
• acyou 3y ago
  Here's my theory: One of the reasons the Internet is (was) so good is that it was a communication mechanism with a filter. It used to be that you had to work hard (and pay more) to host anything on the Web and get your content seen. That meant that the Web had more high-quality content, written by high-quality people. Inaccessibility on the content authoring and hosting side is a feature, not a bug. Now that anyone can easily and cheaply host or dump out content, the quality has gone down. Internet content will continue to go down in proportion to how easy it is to get your content out in front of people. Is this a new theory? Or am I repeating what is already a widely shared theory?
  • spencerflem 3y ago
    I've heard it before, don't know if the theory has a name though. Fwiw, I disagree. To me, the best sites on the old internet we made by generous people donating their time and energy to make something cool, and nowadays 1. The internet is no longer cool in the same way, 2. The community is different & most importantly 3. The vast amount of ad-based commercial websites. Adding a financial barrier would just make it more dominated by commercial entities, and people wanting to share their stuff for fun would be more likely to post in a silod social media app instead of a website.
  • chasing 3y ago
    Feels like a variation on the idea of Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • mikeiz404 3y ago
    That makes sense to me. Additional theory: Online payments weren’t initially possible / trusted and that meant lots of content online was put there out of passion rather than to derive a profit (another filtering criteria).
• marbu 3y ago
  Let's assume that having full control over your phone is a problem. Then the biggest issue lies with power management. A phone will try to power down any subsystem which seems to be underused and that doesn't play well with a server listening on a network socket all the time. So either you will have to disable power management negatively affecting the battery life or accept that most of the time your server won't be able to handle requests.
• tuetnsuppe 3y ago
  I don’t buy the basic premise of the post. Why should a mobile server be good thing? It is either a constant drain on the battery or a server that responds very rarely. I remember taking a mobile communication class in university in 2007 and it was full of acronyms and history of standards but had some interesting stuff to it, eg how networks using directional microwave antenna would not work after an earth quake. However, one of the last topics was the problem of routing for mobile servers and how to find optimized path if both the client and the server frequently change physical locations. And I remember the professor saying how this is a big unsolved problem for the industry. I think it is just not something that many people would use in practice.
• adamgravitis 3y ago
  I'd rather they be able to run mail servers. SMTP lends itself to intermittent delivery.
• majikandy 3y ago
  Great idea. What should we host?
• fnord123 3y ago
  Why the heck would I want to open a port to accept http connections to the wild wild web on my phone? Servers are constantly being probed and I can't imagine I'd want to manage a firewall from my phone. Then there's data plans... Oy vey!
• roxil 3y ago
  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 with being able to run a web server on android. Just recently, while I was bored on a train ride, I used the Fdroid app Lightweight Web Server (LWS) to send some files to a friend on iPhone for which I would otherwise have no easier way of doing (whatsapp upload is slower and filesize is limited). I move the files into the folder, prepare the HTML file a bit, then my friend sets up a wifi hotspot, I connect and tell my friend to enter the IP-Address or scan a QR code. Works nicely for me (although weirdly it doesn't work if I create the hotspot. I need to connect to theirs, I wonder why) Even if this is something I only use rarely, using a phone that can't do something this simple is unacceptable to me. It's satisfying in itself that I don't want my phone manufacturer to arbitrarily limit what the hardware can and cannot do. Would I suggest running a business website off my phone? No. I doubt it's secure, performance is limited, ddos would be a possible issue. Do I still want to be able to do silly things with the devices I purchase? Absolutely. Another point, if I remember correctly, a cellphone mesh network of some kind was useful for Hong Kong protestors at one point at least.
  • yonatan8070 3y ago
    When you start up the hotspot, what address is your friend using to connect?
    • kreetx 3y ago
      Not OP but I would try something with a .1 ending, deriving the first three bytes from the client phone's IP. Although, when creating a hotspot, Android might make a new network namespace for it so you still wouldn't be able to connect to the web server.
    • roxil 3y ago
      Your friend creates the hotspot, you connect to it like any other WiFi network and then for the address, they enter the IP of your phone which is shown on the lws app or it can be scanned as a qr code. (It doesn't work for some reason, if you create the hotspot. I don't know why. I edited my previous post to correct this detail)
• danans 3y ago
  > Back in 2009, anynone with a Nokia could have a personal website running on their own phone. Sadly this amazing piece of tech was never widely adopted. It's not sad, just sensible. In 2009 it made no sense to host a website on a phone. If you didn't want to use a hosting service, an old desktop or laptop made more sense than a smartphone even then. A smartphone as a server could be useful for some in-person use cases where internet access is either unavailable or undesired. For example: an emergency neighborhood communication network, or perhaps a p2p shopping experience for swap meets. However, these use cases tend to be rare (total internet outages usually get fixed very quickly), or of marginal real-world value (at a swap meet you just walk around to see what's available), so there aren't many resources dedicated to developing solutions for them.
• JakeAl 3y ago
  Whatever the problem this would appear to solve, it makes more sense to me that router company should simply build in a 256GB web server into every router so people can host their own site. Routers are expensive and what's another $20 on the price? Hell do a deal with WordPress to use their software like the router companies do with VPN software. They already add FTP capabilities for NAS drives.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    > do a deal with WordPress to use their software like the router companies do with VPN software. This is the kind of thing that I'd like to see.
• mrRA 3y ago
  Still possible on iphone. Install iSH. And host your website even in sleep / idle mode.
• mark_l_watson 3y ago
  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.
• yonatan8070 3y ago
  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)
• abigail95 3y ago
  It's a neat trick to demo a PoC on your phone if you find something really poorly optimized. I took a product that was "required" "minimum spec" to be run on a c5.2xlarge, fixed it and ran it on my phone, with a load test. It achieves showing how wasteful their approach to resources was, and how powerful smartphones have become, and a cool way to show off. If someone wants to know how resource intensive something is, if you can say I can get X Tx/QPS on my phone, it's probably not that complicated, and not that hard to run/maintain.
  • thih9 3y ago
    The “showing how wasteful their approach to computing resources was” part wouldn’t work on me. I think I no longer see phones as inferior computing resources, at least not that much. My phone can use ai to generate images locally[1], process video or camera raws, run better games than my laptop and likely more. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/draw-things-ai-generation/id6444050820 https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/draw-things-ai-generation/id64...
• ghoshbishakh 3y ago
  This blog is running on a phone: https://androidblog.a.pinggy.io/ https://androidblog.a.pinggy.io/
• kureikain 3y ago
  In 2012, I need to sync data between a set-top box device(a karaoke machine) and an ios/android device to transfer SQLite data between them. The ios/android app literally spin up a HTTP server run on the phone, the device just hit it to download file up to 20MB. I was dumb and didn' think much, and it just works. It works so well I never pay attention to it. Eventually the app evolve where the entire config is push this way, one can open the app, edit config, and it save these into XML file. The setipbox will download that XML file. Then even better, there is a webserver run on the phone, where one on the same wifi network can hit it and edit all the config on a very simple website instead of using the app UI. Such as upload file from your desktop into the phone(the song book). Of course, the app needs to be running for all this to work. When the app close, the webserver is also shut down. So yes, even in 2012 on those cheap devices, one can run a full feauted webserver on the web server.
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  This site is so weird sometimes. No… we don’t want phones to be webservers. What a weirdly specific request. When is the last time you met someone in the real world who hosts their own website? Webhosting is like £1 a month for the kind of thing you would be able to host on a phone. That makes infinitely more sense than this nonsense.
• Findecanor 3y ago
  Back in 2010-ish I talked to a Nokia engineer that said that their own study had concluded that it was a bad idea to have a phone be a server, because of battery draw. It wasn't just about the number, size and frequency of requests: the cellphone protocol at the time also required the transceiver to be in a state of readiness for a time interval in-between requests, during which it drew more battery. And the software was not in control of those time intervals — the network operator was. (If I had signed an NDA I don't remember, it should have expired by now)
• collsni 3y ago
  I was waiting for the part in the article where I was told the site I was on was running on a cell phone lol
• ceving 3y ago
  The NAT cancer prevents this.
• anacrolix 3y ago
  https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink
• rasse 3y ago
  Android + Termux + nginx + cloudflared?