Thanks @mikey and @arj

Having slept over it, I'm starting to realize that perhaps the best innovation of this is just the easy setup without fiddling with the terminal, and the possibility to open a webpage to configure the server.

So maybe the next iteration would be improving the page that says "Empty mirror" to be an admin page instead, and have more configuration options, and then once the user presses a submit button, it configures the pub forever (without possibility of reconfiguring). This is to avoid having an authentication layer, and assumes that the first request to the server is almost certainly to be from the owner of the server.