Use BOINC! Support scientific advancement
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Mine crypto to donate
Good intentions, but I would be wary of anything not official like foldingathome or boinc (both great projects I recommend)
The reason is other people are horrible, and while your intentions are good, it's significant risk. Lemmy had a csam attack a while ago and I immediately moved my instance to the cloud because I learned that if I even accidentally hosted anything it means immediate seizure, self hosting it means they plow through my door and yank the servers.
Tor nodes, peertube, you open yourself up to that risk
BOINC is great. In its day, you could get an enormous amount of computing power on a shoestring budget thanks to volunteers. It also helped the volunteers feel like they were more a part of something, because they were! I used to have a small server farm crunching numbers for science.
Unfortunately, the landscape has changed. Some projects are still around, but many of the big players have left. Computing power is a lot more accessible now, and the main limitation is time spent analyzing the data rather than the computation itself. Cloud computing can make just about any computation happen fast for a reasonable price without having to own all of that hardware. GPUs have exploded in computation capacity. Just, a lot of factors came together where the need isn’t as great.
With that said, I still run it on one mini PC, but the payoff for having to write your application in a distributed fashion doesn’t have the return on investment that it used to.
Where are you hosting your instance now? I've been looking into a cheap VPS for the things I'd rather not host on my personal home network.
I landed on digital ocean. Fair prices for a vpc and a reliable name
K&T Host does Lemmy and it works great. Their support is stellar.
"my instance to the cloud because I learned that if I even accidentally hosted anything it means immediate seizure,"
That sounds a bit extreme. You are not hosting csam on purpose. And most likely try to moderate as good as possible.
I actually believe more people should host their own server. And get rid of the cloud. Not moving more to the cloud.
You are not hosting csam on purpose. And most likely try to moderate as good as possible.
Look up what “strict liability” means in a criminal law context.
Well, I'm willing to take the risk then. I host all my fediverse services at home.
Yikes. Good luck to you, noble goals, but there are real consequences for even unknowingly hosting that content.
Tja.
It doesn’t matter if you’re intentionally hosting it.
The Tor network relies on volunteers to donate bandwidth. The more people who run relays, the better the Tor network will be. The current Tor network is quite small compared to the number of people who need to use Tor, which means we need more dedicated volunteers like you to run relays.
Pretty sure tor is a honeypot... Not sure the alternatives though
Edit: maybe honeypot is not the right word, but at the nation-state level this won't keep you anonymous I'm guessing. Good for normal people who want more privacy
That's definitely not what I've heard, please elaborate.
Tor itself may not be, but private users are competing against NSA resources or something
Take everything I say with a grain of salt. I don't think the protocol itself is broken with enough people doing exit nodes, and I think normal people will benefit from privacy granted by tor.
But I bet with high certainty that if the NSA wants you it can probably find you.
The below YouTubers I've seen before but I also can't independently verify whether they are just click baiting or not...
You may install BOINC and contribute to scientific computations.
Is there any way to exclude US projects, or only pick projects that are non-profit or open-source?
I wouldn't want to waste energy on something that the Christian Taliban will likely destroy, or benefit from; or go to patented corporate research.
Yes, you select projects that you participate in by yourself.
Noice
That's not really how this works
You can check out https://foldingathome.org/ (Folding@Home) projects, where you contribute your spare CPU or GPU power for various science research.
I think lower CPU usage is good. CPUs tend to be the most efficient this way and it allows for sudden usage spikes without lag.
If you’re willing to donate bandwidth, I suggest I2P or a public SyncThing node. My server chews through a terabyte of bandwidth helping people securely access their files. I also run Tor’s Snowflake proxy which helps users reach the network.
I2P is Java. SyncThing and Snowflake are written in Go which means you can’t pull off typical memory corruption attacks in these relatively safe languages, and it’s fairly easy to run them in a container.
I2p has several implementations including Java
You probably don't want your server maxing out all day, your electricity bill will thank you
don't want your server maxing out all day
But don't you think about that poor server?
It is feeling so bored out and it's whole life worthless...
I don’t feel like it makes a huge difference for me and I run quite a few servers. It’s mainly the cooling costs in the summer months that run up the bill.
It's just a mini computer. Most likely pretty efficient processor but also not very powerful.
You could install peertube and share other peoples traffic.
You could mine crypto on my behalf (I'll keep the profits)
A Fedi instance requires a time commitment, there are some good suggestions in here but I recommend some alternative frontends.
You could also use it for running more services at home 😬. Thinks like Wekan, nextcloud, gitlab, matrix server, mbin, mastodon, grafana, mumble..
ok but there'll still be a lot of idle capacity that can be put to good use. I relatively rarely browse I2P, but I'm happy to contribute bandwidth. It's safe too, because I only see encrypted traffic coming from one relay and going to another one, and it does not run an "exit node"
- install gitlab-runner on your VM
- hook to a few projects as available runners
- do that again
I’m guessing as a mini pc it doesn’t have much processing power to begin with, so barely worth it - especially when you look at the downsides of wear and tear on the machine, performance degradation for your own services, electricity bill increase, etc.