Okay, so I'm semi-new to networking and to back-end web development, and am learning Flask presently.
I just turned on a basic little HTTP server on my laptop ("Hello World!") and am running it on port 5000. If I go to 127.0.0.1:5000 in my browser, I see the message correctly.
And if (on another computer in the house) I go to 192.168.1.40:5000, the private IP of the computer being used for the server, then I can see it from there, too.
But what if I want a friend to be able to access it from outside the local network, from far away? How do they find it?
I asked google what my IP (IPv4) was and tried using that, but as I expected it didn't work, since (as I understand it) that just resolves to the router itself, not necessarily the particular computer running the server. What am I doing wrong here?