Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android? (packmates.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?

Wait, what?

Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.

We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...

The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.

It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.

In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."

Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/broadband-coverage-europe-2021

PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.

cc: @selfhosted
#selfhosted #selfhosting

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You absolutely want to remove the batteries. Otherwise they would die of old age pretty soon and then it creates danger of fire. Either a new battery for your 'server' every 5 years, or some tinkering solution, maybe supercapacitors.

Then you need an OS with long term support/maintenance. Not stock Android, because it evolves away from old hardware too fast. Maybe something like Lineage.

One problem remains: I have serious doubts about the network interface, if it can handle high throughput or many connections, like a webserver for several users, or even torrenting. A NAS for 1 person seems very possible, though.