this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Hello folks,

I have a mini PC which I use to host my website and some lightweight services. The mini PC idles at ~10% cpu usage. I was wondering if I can contribute 90% of CPU to the community. Thinking that maybe I can host other people's websites for free.

How can I do that? Should I host some fediverse software? What do I do with this much processing power?

Thanks in advance!

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[–] komorebi@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago

ArchiveTeam Warrior!

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 58 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 14 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] TaiCrunch@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You may install BOINC and contribute to scientific computations.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, you select projects that you participate in by yourself.

[–] deur@feddit.nl -2 points 1 week ago

That's not really how this works

[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

https://community.torproject.org/relay/

[–] Scrubber0777@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 week ago

You can check out https://foldingathome.org/ (Folding@Home) projects, where you contribute your spare CPU or GPU power for various science research.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

I2p has several implementations including Java

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 13 points 1 week ago

You could install peertube and share other peoples traffic.

[–] shiftymccool@programming.dev 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You probably don't want your server maxing out all day, your electricity bill will thank you

[–] Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 19 points 1 week ago

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...

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 1 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] Zahtu@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago

Use BOINC! Support scientific advancement

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 4 points 1 week ago

A Fedi instance requires a time commitment, there are some good suggestions in here but I recommend some alternative frontends.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago
  1. install gitlab-runner on your VM
  2. hook to a few projects as available runners
  3. do that again
[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

You could mine crypto on my behalf (I'll keep the profits)

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au -1 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] squid_slime@lemm.ee -4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Joelk111@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You'd be better off directly donating.

[–] squid_slime@lemm.ee 5 points 6 days ago

I know, should of added /s