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.
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 .