I really like this article from Rohan D "Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website". In it, they make the convincing case that phones are perfectly capable of hosting websites and - if we want more people to escape the walled-gardens - this could be a good way to get people back into […]
@Edent Great post, if only our telephones could be the general purpose computers they were born to be!
In practice, I think you've hit the nail on the head with the protocol and security issues. You can 100% self host on a #Pinephone. Just not on anything that will run your banking apps.
There's a need for a new protocol approach that includes buffering if you want to cover the downtime/out of signal or battery case. One neat partial solution would be failover #DNS to a self hosted backup.
@Edent Yeah, I mean. Maybe my old phone sitting on a shelf at home but my actual current phone trapped underground in a tube-train for an hour as I cross London ain't gonna be serving no HTML pages.
@Edent i mean, the security concerns set off a lot of red flags for me, but setting that aside,
you can already put apache on android. I think the hard part is making it consistently reachable via URL, as your IP address will change every so often. That, and i think cell providers might be blocking that exact kind of incoming traffic, but i'll be honest, i haven't checked in over a decade at this point.
@Edent Completely agree, but IMO it will only happen when web protocols become decentralised.
Publish your phone site to IPFS, and it probably works fine while you're in the subway. It also drains less battery since your phone only needs to respond to a fraction of all requests.
If the site needs to be more resilient, pay almost nothing to make the network guarantee that your data is persisted, or set up your own mini-persister-server at home.
@Edent For a user, it is the same experience as publishing with DNS and HTTP. The important difference is that other devices can save your website and forward it. This way, if you want to access my site hosted on my phone, you don't need to connect to my phone, you can just connect to a device in your town that already did this, and download it from there. This discovery happens automatically. Of course it requires someone to have the data, which is why you can pay the network to save your data.
@Edent You don't need to pay, if nobody has your website saved, the network will get it from your phone.
The paying part is only if you want to be 100% sure that someone can still access your data while your phone is disconnected. If you don't pay, it is more of a 50% chance that a small website will be available, because you are counting on the fact that someone else has recently opened your website and can send a copy of it.
@Edent Sure it might not be served from your phone, but you will control what is being served, you won't be paying anyone to serve the data, and it won't be in a walled garden. IPFS is just as open and interoperable as HTTP.
If the purpose is to make it easy and free for people to use their existing hardware for publishing, it seems to me like it is the perfect solution.
@atjn
I'm obviously missing something.
If I write HTML on my phone, then go "git push origin main" it will appear on GitHub pages (or similar).
Or I could write using the WordPress app and then have it appear on my (self) hosted blog.
@Edent Okay sorry if I didn't make this clear. You would need to change your publishing workflow such that the HTML is being served from your phone, just as the article mentions. You cannot use GitHub pages at all, and you would need to be hosting WordPress from your phone if that is what you want to use.
@Edent It is important to note that IPFS is not an intermediary in the same way that GitHub is. It is a new network protocol that does things differently from HTTP, it is not a set of servers.
@Edent My answer is: Yes, but if you serve it with HTTP, your phone will have so much battery drain and your website will be so unstable that you give up and go back to using a hosting provider, GitHub or other walled garden.
But you can serve directly from your phone if you use IPFS, because it mitigates the issues with HTTP. IPFS is not an intermediary (unless you also classify HTTP as an intermediary).
@atjn I don't know how to say this - but I don't have a clue what you're talking about.
I've been working on the web and web standards for quite some time and you haven't managed to explain this to me in a way I understand. You haven't explained the user need at all.
Respectfully - you need to work on your elevator pitch.
@Edent@atjn apologies for not replying sooner. Was at a work thing.
I'm no expert on this... But, as I understand;
IPFS is an alternative protocol which puts your data on many devices. You then index a reference to the data you're serving, not the device.
Initially, you serve from your device all the time.
Soon you may pay the network to host some of that traffic for you, perhaps you know you'll be off network a bit, so you want the network to reply if you can't, and so on.
Although I'm not against it (more in favor) of a phone being a server I also think it's a bit limited to only think of a mobile phone. Granted it's one of the more powerful computation devices a person owns, but I rather see an orchestration of devices then the phone being a new walled garden.
@Edent don't give me more battery-life anxiety! (I'm being facetious, but I had to buy a top-of-the-line phone also because of battery life, it gets through the work day and a bit of personal time too before needing a recharge).
Add comment