It doesn't need to be a personal phone. If you get a new phone, you could do a factory reset on your old phone and use it as a webserver in this way. And since you aren't taking it with you anywhere, you can leave it at home plugged in and on wifi, for better uptime than your regular phone.
What would be really cool is if we could easily share hosting burden of m sites on n devices.
As an alternative to paying a subscription fee for some service, you could instead just have your hardware do enough compute/storage to offset your usage.
Very disingenuous as they've release many products over the years. With each of these releases they've moved the development of the Safe Network forward. Simply take a look here - https://safenetforum.org/c/development/releases/76/ A test network was just closed and they'll be fixing a couple of things releasing another ASAP.
I've still got some learning to do, but the whole kademlia dht thing is a pretty interesting middle ground between the IPFS approach (not enough redundancy) and the blockchain approach (too much redundancy).
I'm not sure it's ideal because if the network partitions you're going to end up with a more or less random assortment of data in your partition. Better for the biology data to end up on the partition with the university that specializes in that and the physics data to end up nearest its users as well. (This may be handled at a higher level, but I haven't gotten that far yet.) Nonetheless, I'm glad somebody is exploring the design space.
I'm not saying they haven't been doing things, but the big decentralized Internet they touted from the beginning still doesn't exist AFAIK.
When I can host a website and have it stay up indefinitely with zero maintenance.. then I think they have something.
I'm sure it's an enormous amount of work and I did buy some coin so I don't mean to be disparaging, but I stopped tracking updates after a couple years because it's all been technical mumbo jumbo and they don't seem to be moving the needle. They've had many "test networks" over the years.
I know that people can use IPFS to voluntarily pin data so that it is redundantly hosted, but supposing there's some paid service that goes with that data, I don't think IPFS helps identify the users that have been pinning the data so that you can offer them the service for free.
In theory the users could just mine filecoin and pay for the service in that, and then I could dispatch storage contracts to the users in ways that ensure that the entire dataset stays pinned, but so far as I know that's not built in. Besides, a spare phone isn't up to the task of mining filecoin (you need a pretty beefy rig).
I think it would be cheaper and simpler to keep the "have you pinned enough data to justify a free premium account?" Logic all together in one place and not introduce the mining process as an intermediary, but not so cheap and simple that every app that does it should have to implement it themselves.
You could, but if it's in the app store for the masses to do, most of them won't be, and that's sort of the point of the suggestion here in my mind. Easy self-hosting for the masses with the device they already have.
There are lots of old phones out there, and rather than getting binned it's nice to think of them being put to use. With the exception of the rather young, nearly everyone's had more than one phone in their lifetime, and even an old smartphone is more than powerful enough to run a simple webserver.
I agree with you, but I think your missing my point. If I go and put something like this in the Play/iOS stores, what percentage of users looking to run a small site do you suppose run it on the phone they use everyday vs running it on a wiped old device that they have plugged in in the corner? If you think most will take the proper precautions you have more faith in humanity than I do. Personally, I think even with the somewhat nerdy nature of the app >50% will be running it out of whatever is in their pocket, no matter what kind of warning banner I might put somewhere. And I'm nopeing out of handing that foot-gun to them.
If the app is sandboxed, then it's the same level of risk as browsing the web on your phone. Sandbox escapes are rare enough that the people who find them aren't deploying them against randos.
