You mentioned phones, which reminds me how much I wish there was a nice toolchain that would allow for hosting a webserver or maybe a federated social network of some sort on old android hardware. There are millions of old smartphones sitting in junk drawers and it's a shame they can't be put to good use.
1. GP quote: "Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers."
2. Your quote: "federated social network of some sort on old android hardware."
Put 1 and 2 together.
The only reason Facebook exists is as a middleman between people trying to pass messages to each other.
If people could easily find each other and run trusted non-proprietary software:
A. there'd be no ads
B. all comms are direct so government agencies couldn't simply compel access from a single source
The tricky part is people have to be willing to pay for the plumbing in this case. I think that paradigm shift can take place, but we have to show them why it's worth it first, which is difficult due to network effects.
Google could setup a domain and simply provide people freely with "[usersPublicKey].domain" subdomains updated by users with a dynamic dns client. Even if this were a google special DNS service not part of the global DNS this could work.
Google could also then provide a messaging app to use this service but if some other open source app were to become the defacto and make facebook irrelevant that is still a big win for google. Advertising $$ with one less big competitor.
If Google marketed this correctly then they could be seen as a champion of privacy too.
what you are looking for is abandoning the Android OS on them and flashing something akin to postmarketOS. This can still come with a workable touch-based GUI. But also just installing things like web-servers and php runtimes via a package-manager. Surprisingly broad support: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Exactly what I was thinking: I don't see the point of running a server on an old Android device. Just install Linux there, right? And typically there pmOS seems like a promising project!
I've done some work on this. Android is a very toxic environment for this sort of thing, primarily due to draconian filesystem permissions and aggressive killing of services. It's all in the name of security and battery life, but I wish there were an easy way to turn that all off for selfhosting.
I've also seen people mention that apparently the flash memory doesn't do well with server type workloads, but a lot of that could probably be mitigated with logging to RAM, using a CDN, etc.
