Use an old android phone to selfhost ?

Termux has nginx, postgres, python and plenty of stuff compiled to ARM so I bet you can. You would have to be wary of non standard ports unless you have root access and make sure android does not kill or puts to sleep termux by adding exceptions to the app.

I remember running a few low traffic Mastodon bots in a S3 Mini years ago and it was decent.

google for the things you want to host and append "termux" to it, e.g.:

• nextcloud on termux
• piped on termux

But if it does not getting any updates, it is a bit risky.. Find a custom which gets security updates and then do whatever they say in other comments.

thats a server baby

Until one week ago I was using an old Samsung A20 with good results. I moved to a mini PC as I wanted to host Immich server and I felt it was too much for the phone (it might not be the case though...)

A quick extract from an old post of mine on what I was running: https://lemmy.world/comment/354199

Software: Termux (android app) SSH (OpenSSH in Termux) Rclone (in Termux) Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr (in proot-distro) Transmission (in proot-distro) Kavitha (in proot-distro) Podgrab (in proot-distro) Ombi (in proot-distro) ntfy (in proot-distro) Filebrowser (in proot-distro) Vaultwarden (in proot-distro) Homer with lighttpd (in proot-distro)

TLDR: Go for it! Use Termux with proot-distro to avoid headaches

If postmarket os works on that device maybe you can go full Linux (alpine), there will be no systemd which might be a problem and I am not even sure about docker compatibility. You can look it up though.

Tried to host a pihole with distrobix some time ago, eventually it just stopped responding sadly. I want a debian server that I can ssh into, it's the bare minimum to host stuff IMO. Tmux is great, but I use it as a client, not a server.

Best case would be to trash the whole android os and somehow get a real Linux distro running headless (I know android is technically Linux, but it does not count)

Reading this post on my mi A3 right now :D

Should work, tho I doubt it's much more performant than a pi, so your ideas might be too heavy for it.

Can anyone chime in about the safety of this from a battery standpoint? If it's going to function that way it'll probably have to be plugged in all the time, and that device's battery is not removable.

You could download OnionShare and upload any files to that, and then you can access them from any Tor browser

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

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