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.
Wait are you messaging from mastodon?? Is that why the emoji won’t render
@Omniraptor ah yes! Probably that’s why.
Actually the whole original post was sent via Mastodon.
I tend to write posts that I share to my Mastodon followers and then at the end I mention a Lemmy community if I believe the community would also find it interesting.
That is so cool I didn’t realize lemmy and mastodon were different views into the same database, assumed they were different services with no overlap except some underlying tech (I don’t know much about fediverse structure). But how does that work with like, character limits? Iirc lemmy can have much longer comments