cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5768010

You know BOINC, the thing where you can donate your processing power to specific computational projects?
Is there anything like that, but for hosting platforms / services?
Something where you could say “I am willing to dedicate this much of my CPU, RAM and storage space to this project or this group of people”.
Say that I have a server that is more or less collecting dust, and I want to make it do something productive.
I am aware of YUNOHost and alternatives, but that still requires me to choose which things to deploy and also somehow then offer that to the community.
As a certified lazy dude, I would much rather say “here’s the computer, use it for whatever you need the most”.
The issue I see with this is that my goodwill could be abused for hosting something inappropriate or even illegal, and then I would be held responsible. So there should be some transparency requirement or some other mechanism that helps prevents this.

And yes, self-hosting would not be the accurate term to describe this kind of distributed resource sharing. “croud-sourced self-hosting”? “crowd-hosting” sounds like a good description for this phenomenon.
Some implementation of this probably already exists. Please provide any relevant names or links that would help me find more about this.

    • testman@lemmy.mlOPM
      1·
      1 year ago

      I am aware of those two, but those are just for file storage. I was thinking something more general. Like having a Virtual Private Server, that people can extend with their donated resources. VPS can be used for more than just file storage. It can do processing as well.

      • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
        5·
        1 year ago

        it will 100% be abused by assholes for mining some millicents in monero or do ddos attacks.

        Processing for a website need to be as fast as possible. Nobody would like a loading screen “please wait - contacting p2p node 32292 for rendering your page” that will last several seconds, pages on a peer and database on another, plus all the overhead to manage sync between all the nodes

        file storage doesn’t require ultrafast processing. Make a static website with hugo, host pages on gh pages, and downloads on ipfs

  • thirdBreakfast@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is a genuinely fresh and intriguing idea, but you’ve sort of answered your own question (as have most of the commenters) by noting it would immediately be abused. So I think you are going to have to be the one deciding how your compute cycles and bandwidth are being used.

    BOINC/World Community Grid is the obvious choice since they are set up for exactly this use case. There’s also things like Sheepit - a render farm. Maybe you could run a Tor node .