Sharing is Caring
For most people, sharing is easy. Whenever I need to do service on my car, I know multiple garages where I'm welcome to just show up as long as no one else got there first. Most of the people I know are welcome to grab apples from my apple trees if they need.
But when it comes to IT, its a lot harder. I have a little raspberry pi that runs some dockers, servers and such. I could absolutely share it, allowing other people to host their own docker images for fun little hobby projects. It uses only a couple of watts anyway. The question is just, for whom?
Most of the people I know in real life are either not interested in IT, or already have their own setup with everything they need. They are just like me, sitting upon unused resources that could easily be shared.
So who actually needs these resources then? Well, when I was a youngling I would have been very grateful to have access to a server to host my ugly websites, perhaps a Minecraft server, maybe some central server for some programming experiments. But I'm not a youngling anymore.
So if I could somehow share my resources with other young people who want to tinker with a server then that would be great. However, I don't really hang with pre/young teens, believe it or not. And allowing access to my server to anyone on the open internet is a very, very bad idea.
So, how do we solve this? How do we handle discovery and vetting, without allowing bad actors. I don't know. Basically, how could thirteen year old me both find a host and prove that I didn't have any bad intentions to its owner? I would honestly like to know - because solving this would both make it easier and more welcoming to start tinkering with IT, and also make self-hosting more rewarding.
(Yes I know there are multiple services with free tiers that offer hosting, but since they are for profit they are destined to be enshittified, hobbyist self-hosters are the only reliable, charitable option that won't necessarily get enshittified).
If you have a good solution, or if it already exists, let me know. Make a blog post or just mail me at bigboismith at proton dot me.
For example, I am running out of hard drive space, but I don't have any more space in my case for another drive. I would be grateful if I could of-load some archival >200GB to some underused NAS.