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.
I’d be more inclined to say Raspberry Pi. Low power, small, scalable.
And if you want Android, there’s a
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#banana-pi
I’m currently designing a sync/backup/mesh network device for family/friends. Something they can simply plugin, and I can manage remotely.
I mean, android is fine I guess, but it’s being pushed to be less and less able to be separated from Google. I think for a lot of people interested in self hosting, there’s a low amount of interest in it because of that.
@southsamurai Oh that’s definitely a huge concern, but not just for self-hosting but for privacy in general.
But still, if the average joe wants to self-host something using an old phone is probably the easiest way to get them to try self-hosted alternatives and drop corporate / commercial services.
Maybe not the ‘average average joe’ such as my parents, but anyone who is minimally curious enough to do stuff such as registering a domain, setting up a game server for friends and maybe has opened the CMD windows console once or twice in the past following a tutorial. That kind of demographic (IDK if it has a name) might be much more inclined to self-host if it was as easy as installing an APK and letting your phone one somewhere at home.
Overall as long as Android doesn’t become straight out malicious spyware itself, the benefit of dropping commercial alternatives might very well be a net positive. In a worst-case scenario, any tunnel / vpn configuration necessary to expose a service to the internet could also add an automated step to blackhole requests to google’s tracking servers.
I think there’s some truth to it. But I imagine it will be more AOSP than what android is with google services. AOSP is really a great operating system with very good security and built in features. And with neural engines and high bandwidth emmc, it is mostly just lacking a large amount of storage to make it all complete, but the latest SOCs are most probably powerful enough. Is there something like docker for android? :)
Edit: I do recognize what someone else said, which is that one big challenge would be software updates. We are not that limited by hardware when we consider servers, they can easily run for years with regular software updates.
I’d rather use a real OS, thank you
Counterpoint: spicy pillows
I was going to host pihole on an old android until I noticed it getting quite warm while continuously connected to power. Realised I didn’t know the lifespan of the battery and didn’t want it tp start a fire.
Just for shiggles, I setup and ran a minecraft Java server on an old phone for a little while. I did this through Termux.
It was surprisingly good.
@Wander @selfhosted Sounds like a great way to kill you phone’s battery. But maybe if you created an ad-hoc stack… Have you ever heard of @veilidnetwork ?
The future of selfhosted services might includes phones yes, Android most likely not.
Think about it, those phones might work right now but in 10 years their Android versions will not support anything, they wont even have root certificate updates breaking SSL, the kernel will be missing support for whatever people need and whatnot. Maybe the phones won’t even boot because some key will expire somewhere… let alone security vulnerabilities.
People selfhost on 10-year old hardware right now, but they do install modern Linux distros that are well supported and up to date. I believe the most likely scenario is that at some point the “security” of most of that hardware will be broken and you’ll be able to run some version of AOSP for older hardware and/or a generic Linux.
@Wander @selfhosted I have old Pixel phones with LineageOS installed, but I haven’t found a good way to prevent battery inflation. I’d love a way to limit charge to 50% or to bypass the battery altogether.
@ahoyboyhoy @selfhosted How old is the phone and what version of the OS are you using? I was under the impression that modern phones bypass the battery when connected to the charger and having full charge.
Regarding limiting the charge, I believe there’s some software calibration you can do which would allow you to set it to 50%. I’m no expert in battery or repairs at all, so someone else might have a better idea.
@Wander @selfhosted I have a Pixel 3 and 5. Where might I find out if the charge controller functions as you say?
Try acca
@Wander @selfhosted I in fact already use android for syncthing.
@AMS @selfhosted yes, hopefully we’ll see an explosion in self-hostable alternatives that can be installed as easily as syncthing.
IMO, more like Linux. Android for such old devices is unmaintained, but if you’re able to run Linux on it you’ll still be able to apply kernel updates and security updates for software will continue to exist. Many things are opensource too and you should be able to recompile them on the android device to make it run.
Seems like this is a great use-case for an RPi. At least for single/few user setups
@Wander @selfhosted also, don’t forget that it’s easy enough to run Linux on Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/tech.ula/
@ahoyboyhoy @selfhosted Nice. I remember trying it out once. Actually I might use that to follow my own advice and self-host at home once I retire my current phone.
True, I haven’t had the need because I know how to run stuff on a server, but for personal files it’s probably better to host things at home.
It has an UPS builtin 😇
Jokes aside I used to run a few python bots inside termux on my very old S3 Mini a few years ago. It did the job at least.
Upvoted, but I feel horrified by the notion. I’d much rather have a headless server
@MigratingtoLemmy use a hammer to break the screen, control via adb :vlpn_happy_blep:
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
@Omniraptor in theory Mastodon will show a “read more” button for longer comments. Top level posts sent from Lemmy often require clicking the link to view them in full and content isn’t ordered by votes because they don’t exist.
So, it’s a bit messy to read Lemmy from Mastodon, but posting something and then replying to comments on that thread is really easy.
@Omniraptor @Wander Probably user is limited during writing by own instance limit and longer posts of others could be displayed. I saw this between mastodon/misskey instances with various limits, probably it could be similar for lemmy/kbin federation. Currently I am writing this on small mastodon server with 20k limit (never used this fully yet…)
Big problem: updates for something that is directly exposed to internet
Some low end devices will stop getting security updates 6 months after launch because the OEM launches a new model every two weeks and obviously doesn’t have resources to dedicate to it
In some cases, even high end devices don’t get updates and are discontinued internally shortly after launch, for example the Xiaomi mix 3 5g
Yes, root and custom ROMs could solve the problem, but not as easy as regular Linux where you just use a package manager to update. First issue is needing to wipe after updates and you have to reinstall and reconfigure everything
