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.
The raspberry pi, like all RISC chips, uses much less power.
In fact the super computer summit runs on powerpc64 which is a RISC chip, that’s a big reason why its power consumption for a super computer is so low.
I hadn’t considered the RISC angle. Does RISC consistently use less power than CISC at given operations levels (MFLOPS, for example), or is there another/better way to make a power-consumption vs operations/performance comparison?
I realize this is kind of esoteric for my use-cases, but it would be useful for making projections to see if spending X dollars on Y number of Pi’s recoups the investment over a given period, just in power consumption.
E.G. If I can reduce my power consumption by 70% by switching to 3 Rpis, then I can recoup their cost in 2-3 years. Since my server needs replacing anyway, this seems like a no-brainer.