My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.

I mean to say that the connection attempt is failing because the traffic is never reaching the server.

There is no traffic on Port 8081 in those logs

Yeah your iptables is already set to up ACCEPT by default meaning no blocking.

My next step would be to determine whether the traffic is reaching the target machine. Look into how you can monitor inbound traffic and verify whether the server even sees the inbound connection attempt

First obvious question: do you have a firewall enabled?

From a terminal, type “iptables -L” and if there are any rules there (rather than just category headers) you will probably need to allow inbound traffic through the firewall

In one breath the author tells us that people who don’t want to read the article are the target demographic.

And then in the next 8000 breaths they proceed to use some of the most dense, obtuse, wandering, inappropriately poetic language for an essay I’ve seen outside of academia

I agree with nearly everything the author has to say and yet I think the essay is a complete and utter failure at even approaching the goals it claims to have.

Nobody who needs to read this will. Not because it’s too long (though some will have that reason) but because anyone with moderate to poor literacy - the people explicitly called out as the target of the piece - won’t be able to grok half the sentences, let alone an entire paragraph, without re-reading it 2, 3, maybe 4 times.

Unfortunate, because the message, and the information contained within the essay, is incredibly important for those people