@alcinnz I like the idea that running a web server with a personal web site unprofessionally and possibly unreliably could become a common thing to do and a normal part of the open web. If that site offers some piece of software or information that some people rely on in some way, you'll find people who are willing to mirror that site.
I don't know what it is that I like about the idea of a more rudimentary and "home-grown" kind of open web. It seems much more personal and less commercial. That's certainly a big reason.
@Naich@alcinnz I don't know. I joined in the 1990s already. But I had no sense for the difference between a commercial service and a hobby web site as a kid. But I do remember how large of a percentage of web sites were the product of geeking brains and how much of what I found was noncommercial high-quality content. I think a big reason for that was that we didn't have today's search engines, their algorithms and on the other hand, SEO.
When typing my post I mainly meant web sites hosted at home, on laptops or possibly on phones. Most web sites were even in the late 90s hosted at least on dedicated machines if not servers in a data center.
@steeph@Naich@alcinnz every phone is already able to run a web server and is not even really that hard. The thing is, if you want it to run reliably, it cannot be your main phone. It has to be a phone you don't want to use anymore that is permanently connected to a charger on a reliable connection to the internet closer to the router, not on the other side of the house.
And even in that case possibly with some sort of screenlock mechanism and/OR with all battery saving features disabled for the web server.
in that case, YES, it can be done .
FOr your current phone on your pocket: it'll drain your battery. It's as simple explanation as it gets for why isn't this common.
@alcinnz@Naich@steeph home routers YES, 100% agreed. But then you'll find their cost skyrocketing pretty quickly for giving you something they could have already given you before (most run on cut-down version of freebsd anyway) by just letting you install whatever package you wanted on them first or in other words, what's needed is fully OPEN SOURCE routers firmware so we can add whatever features we want. Including web servers.
you know what I've found to be the most cost-effective home server?
OLD THINKPADS!
They abound. Companies lease them, then bin them, and they end up all over auction homes and second-hand stores for peanuts. And unlike RasPis you don't need to buy a separate keyboard/screen/mouse and they come with hard drives, not puny laughable breakable flash drivers.
And you're recycling and undoing the job of Tailor Swift.
@steeph@Naich@alcinnz you can always create your own router as far as you have the right modem for your ISP as part of it. But since most ISPs prefer to have (at least my experience with fibre optics) the router and modem now as separete things, you can directly dispose of your supplier's router and use your own RasPI or other cheap implementation with ALL your desired glory.
@the@Naich@alcinnz Yeah, a phone is probably not the best choice. At least when it travels. When it doesn't, a phone is a mix between a server and a PC already. It even has a UPS built in.
But I have thoughts about what it would be like if running a web server would be such a common thing to do that somebody would do it because they felt like it after writing something on a train. Or they'd maintain a web site on the only computer they ever had access to: their phone.
@steeph@Naich@alcinnz you could have a cloud server with a load balancer, if LB sees IP of phone accesible then serves all traffict through there, if phone is not accesible it sends traffict to alternative server B (which could be itself).
It wouldn't be hard to implement either, just a bunch of NGINX conf files and zero-tier on cloud server and phone to make it simpler in case your phone changes IP (it will)
Then you can LIVE edit your site on your phone and whenver you lose signal (e.g.: you're on a train) site B will be served, that could be either the last working version OR a page saying "I'll be back in a bit".
@the@Naich@alcinnz I guess there are reasons why people use machines that are always online for that. As long as the phone is online, I don't need to exit the site locally. And when it isn't, I can't serve the locally edited site. So editing remotely always makes more sense.
mkl.lol for example could have a copy (and indeed it has) runining on the machine I'm typing to you, that has all changes I want to make to its code, and a production copy that is on mkl.lol and is the one sending you this message.
That's why we have development and production environments. With sometimes a third one called staging.
@steeph@alcinnz ah, OK, the hosting rather than just the content being personal, got you. Definitely an interesting thought - and perhaps increasingly do-able as 5G and FTTP increase uplink speeds..
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