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.
Sounds like IPFS or torrents.
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.
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