[ssivark]

Basically, we’d like everyone to run their own server where they could add your process as a unit, rather than you running a server for everyone.

I guess this might have been very useful as a Huginn module. Maybe Urbit matures to be a functional version of this. The problem is that today’s computing culture grooms people to be dependent on others’ servers/services, rather than being in control of one machine of theirs.

[icebraining]

I mean, sure, I'd like everyone to run their own server. But in this case I don't think you'd even need it, a scheduled task in a regular client machine (smartphone/laptop/etc) would be enough. There just isn't an easy way for me to turn my script into something that a smartphone can use, without building a full-fledged app.

[WorldMaker]

Windows 8.1 (both phone and desktop) briefly supported Live Tiles driven by refresh/pull of a tiny bit of metadata you could easily add to the HEAD section of a webpage. If a user bookmarked that page to their Start Screen, Windows would poll that page every so often (IIRC as often as once every 30 minutes) and the user would see the notification eventually. It was a neat way to run very basic scheduled tasks. [1]

I wish something similar had become more common. I understand why all the platforms are focused on push notifications rather than pull notifications, but it's so much easier to write a bit of HTML/XML templating than to write anything with a PWA ServiceWorker and the Push Notifications API.

[1] The one app I built during that brief time was to poll NaNoWriMo for count API updates. It's a really simple app and was easy to customize with just an old school HTML method="GET" form. https://github.com/WorldMaker/NaNoWriMoAtGlance/