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I would have hooked the smartphone to a small solar panel. The natural daylight cycle would have made sure that the smartphone kept having charging and discharging cycles.

I doubt the traffic hitting it would be sufficient to drain the battery overnight.

That's what the project cited as inspiration does: compost.party
The real question is "what the hell is a farphone"?
Apparently not a misspelled Fairphone, as I originally thought. I wouldn't mind an article about that battery.

No actually, it is a Fairphone after all.

“Farphone” is a given name of a specific fairphone (android smartphone) that the author uses to run their web server.

The name likely comes from “fairphone” with the “i” scraped off - see the photo: https://far.computer/

While I’ve seen plenty of swollen and deformed phone batteries, I’ve never personally seen one that has burned. Obviously it’s happened in the past with certain phone/battery models, but I’d imagine that it’s actually very rare now days?

On the other hand, I have seen cheap 18650s spontaneously start smoking even when they weren’t plugged in to anything…

You can’t be too cautious with spontaneously combustible stuff.
So the Fairphone 2 runs on just a USB cable with no battery inside?
Why not just have the charge controller "unplug" it if the battery is full?
These days it is rare for a phone to be able to be used without a battery. The reason is that the max energy consumption when the CPU and GPU are running 100% exceeds the wattage that the device can accept over USB PD.
I would’ve expected a hardware-based lithium-ion charge controller which would continue to work regardless of what software runs on the main CPU(s).
Does Farphone run Far Manager?