I recently set up a probe on a box in my home lab for Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) that does distributed monitoring of access to various Internet services to monitor censorship. It got me thinking there must be other distributed/collaborative things I could contribute to. I know of some others like:
- BOINC is a grid computing academic research thing where you run a client and donate CPU to crunch academic research data
- NYC Mesh you can volunteer to run a node for their community wireless mesh network
What are some other do-gooder things you can self host on your home network?
Seed torrents of https://annas-archive.org/torrents
Meshtastic node?
Check out https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ - they are really good work preserving websites that are going down by scraping them with a network of distributed “warriors”. You can run one on your hardware and contribute to saving the web for the future
There’s the good-karma-kit, which is a Docker compose bundle of some popular projects: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/good-karma-kit
It could act as a list to go off of, if you don’t want to host all of them. The link has more info on each, as well as which ones are non-profit / for-profit
Overview
Have some space computing power and want to donate it to a good cause? How about 10+ good causes at once?
♻️ put an under-utilized system to good use
🚲 use as much or as little CPU/RAM/DISK as you want
✨ 100% more soul warming than mining
📈 geek out over your CPU/disk/bandwidth stats on the leaderboardsThis is a collection of containers that all contribute to public-good projects:
- networks: Tor, i2p
- computing: boinc, foldingathome
- archiving: archivewarrior, zimfarm, kiwix, archivebox, pywb
- storage: ipfs, storj, sia, transmission
This v1 list was started by the ArchiveBox project, but it’s open to contributions.
Just be careful running a Tor node and what kind of data could be flowing through your machine… It’s Tor… so some of the data can be pretty fuckin unsavory while other data can be political dissidents who need safety.
As long as it’s not an exit node, nobody will be able to tell what the traffic is. It’s all encrypted including the metadata.
I’ve heard of folding@home but haven’t really looked much into it.
You could tun a TOR relay.
And wind up in prison!
Jk that’s an exit node lol