[anderspitman]

In my biased opinion, the "easiest" solution currently is my own boringproxy, which I mention at the top of the list. Once you have the client daemon running on each of your devices (static executable with minimal CLI params and no config file), adding and removing tunnels is just a few clicks in the web UI.

It also has basic e2ee. The TLS certs never leave the client devices by default.

Even so I agree with you that this is still too much. I think a non-technical person should be able to write some content, go through a quick OAuth2 flow to point a domain name at that content, and have it just work. I'm currently working on building something more like that.

[freediver]

If I wanted my grandma to host a folder from her Mac so I can access it from the web, what solution feels best?

[devit]

An hosting service is the only solution since otherwise the website will be down when the Mac is rebooted or moved if it's a laptop.

The service in this article is either for development purposes or for people who are running dedicated home servers (which means they have a Linux desktop that they keep on 24/7 without rebooting and are usually programmers and/or system administrators).

[anderspitman]

What's the goal? Does your grandma want to start a blog and you're talking about hosting the HTML from that folder, or do you want to be able to access the folder to read/write files, or something else?

[freediver]

The goal is to host a html page and/or share a file.

[anderspitman]

I think our thread got too deep and it won't let me reply. Feel free to contact me directly through https://apitman.com or post on https://forum.indiebits.io if you want to talk more.

But to answer your question, you'll need to run a CLI daemon on your grandma's computer. Something like ngrok static files would probably be the easiest:

https://ngrok.com/docs#http-file-urls

But since you're already setting up one daemon in that case, I'd use Cloudflare Tunnel and also run a basic webserver or WebDAV server alongside it to give you more control over how the files are hosted.

Also pretty sure you have to pay for custom domains with ngrok.

[anderspitman]

I'm not aware of a good solution to this currently, but it's a space I'm very interested in. The main problem is that the devices most people use these days (phones and laptops) are constantly being connected and disconnected from networks. So even if you solve the software problem and make a nice GUI program for your grandma to use which automatically handles TLS certs and tunneling, if she closes her laptop her blog goes down.

I think the way to do this may be to ship services as Android apps. Imagine something like self-hosted Google Drive that you install as an app on an old Android phone. After install you go through a quick OAuth2 flow to connect it to a subdomain and open a tunnel, and now you have 64-128GB of e2ee cloud storage. Just plug the phone in and leave it in a corner.

This concept can be applied to Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, your grandma's blog, etc.

[Karrot_Kream]

Overlay networks could offer a good solution here. Today if you have software on OP's grandma's laptop that starts a Wireguard tunnel to a relay host, the laptop can have a stable IPv6 address to which you can connect to. ZeroTier and Tailscale enable this as well.

[freediver]

If persistence is not key, what is the easiest way to do this? Like if I am on a phone with grandma and want to see a local HTML page from her Mac, what do my simplest instructions for her look like?

[ohyeshedid]

Out of curiosity, what kind of content are you looking for in that HTML doc?

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Dropbox? The steps would be:

1) Copy folder to Dropbox subfolder

OR

1a) Go to Preferences->Sync->select which folders to sync -> add the folder that you want to share

2) right-click on it and select Share Dropbox Link

3) copy the link and send it via email/whatsapp

[eli]

iCloud Drive has file sharing built right into the OS