As someone who always had some kind of PDA (CASIO digital diary, Palm, Compaq iPaq) and switched onto the smartphone bandwagon pretty early (SonyEricsson P800/P910i, Qtek 9000, various Androids and various iPhones) ... I don't think I could enjoy the experience with a dumb phone. I love modern technology too much.
I once had a colleague that religiously only used a Nokia 3210 (the newer 3G/4G model). Which meant 160 character messages only. No emojis, no photos (as MMS were expensive). He was also the kind of person to use paper maps when driving - incl. stopping to look for alternative routes if some road was blocked or jammed. That's definitely not for me.
The only way this could work for me would be to have some small PDA that can connect to the phone to use the Internet. And I appreciate that both devices have been merged into smartphones at some point.
There were ads! But these were simple banner graphics of 468x60 pixels. In the worst case it was an animated GIF. But hosted on the same server as the page and without any tracking shenanigans.
Start your own instance, be the change you want to see in the world.
This right here is the beauty of the Fediverse. And as such, it's not "The Fediverse" that's a "Left Wing Circle Jerk", it's just the servers you've found so far.
How do you think this will go down? Parents calling the ISP with "please unblock porn sites for me"? I see various things why this won't work. From ISPs not wanting to increase the number of service calls over Apple's Private WiFi MAC addresses to these kind of customers not even knowing how their devices appear on the router. Nah, completely unfeasible.
Your ISP doesn’t see which device accesses the Internet. They only see their router.
OTOH, most routers already have features to block websites for specific client devices. But good luck putting the onus on the parents to configure that properly.
This works fine with personal contracts like your mobile. (EE has a porn filter that you can disable in your account.)
But it doesn’t quite work for contracts that usually have multiple users. Like your home Internet. Because a child could connect to your WiFi and access that shmutz.
If you’re happy with how Apple Password works for you, I can recommend StrongBox. It keeps all data in a KeePass2 database and integrates into Apple’s AutoFill API. That means it feels almost native when using it. No browser plugin needed. (At least not for Safari.) And you can decide how you sync the database file.
Doesn’t get any more secure than a battle-tested web server hosting simple MP3 files and a text file.
Convenience might be a thing, though. I’m in the Apple ecosystem so their Podcasts app shows that feed on all devices and tracks listening progress, etc.
If I didn’t have that, I’m still a lifetime customer with PocketCasts and PocketCasts Web. So, that’s that. But if you don’t have anything similar in place, a self-hosted streaming server might be the best way to go, yes.
Do you need a web player? I’ve got several years of a radio show on my web server and wrote a script that created an RSS feed for them. This way I can open that in any podcast player (even web based ones) to listen to it.
Does the paper take into account the energy required to compile the code, the complexity of debugging and thus the required re-compilations after making small changes? Because IMHO that should all be part of the equation.
As someone who always had some kind of PDA (CASIO digital diary, Palm, Compaq iPaq) and switched onto the smartphone bandwagon pretty early (SonyEricsson P800/P910i, Qtek 9000, various Androids and various iPhones) ... I don't think I could enjoy the experience with a dumb phone. I love modern technology too much.
I once had a colleague that religiously only used a Nokia 3210 (the newer 3G/4G model). Which meant 160 character messages only. No emojis, no photos (as MMS were expensive). He was also the kind of person to use paper maps when driving - incl. stopping to look for alternative routes if some road was blocked or jammed. That's definitely not for me.
The only way this could work for me would be to have some small PDA that can connect to the phone to use the Internet. And I appreciate that both devices have been merged into smartphones at some point.