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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I clicked this article to look for ways to contribute.. bandwidth. But there is no torrent/ipfs like method to help, just cash. I'd be happy to run a service that would help Wikipedia, archive.org, ddg (any service I believe in) decentralize. I always keep my Ubuntu torrents open for launch days and some beyond. I have a server running and I don't need my 50/50 fiber all the time.

If I was a better software dev, I'd try to make a daemon which I can feed a list of websites which I want to support with my caches that can be upgraded (like the DNS system?). Like a folding at home for bandwidth.

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> just cash

This is almost always the best and most efficient way you can help a cause. You donating infrastructure means donating them extra work - they'll need to integrate and keep track of it, as well as manage a relationship with you (in particular, a risk of problems with you or your service). Meanwhile, with extra cash, they can buy what they need and what integrates well, or pay the most effective specialists they need.

It's an universal principle. Cash is the best gift, if you're gifting to help. That's why e.g. Red Cross frowns at people donating stuff - it creates a huge logistical problem for them as well as depriving them of opportunity to boost the markets in the disaster-struck area. Or why it's better for you to donate money to your local homeless shelter rather than volunteer to work in it - if you work your job for extra hours instead, and donate that money, they'll hire workers better skilled for that task.

But I have bandwidth to share, not cash. I'm already at the lowest subscription level with my ISP. I understand the argument, but if there was a general technical solution this would be nice, right?

That's true. Does such solution exist, though?

I had some hopes for Filecoin (i.e. a P2P system with monetary incentives attached to backing up other people's data, from one of the very few groups in the crypto space that don't look like scammers to me), but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

I used to participate in such a service from Lacie (or was it Lacie?), I shared 1 TB, got 1 TB in return "cloud" storage (I think multiplied by the time you were online actually), which was in fact, distributed (after local encryption) over many other online PCs. I ran it on my server but one was not even obligated to keep their PC on. It worked "meh" (it was all java based with a meh UI) and they discontinued it.

If you have bandwidth to share but not cash, use the bandwidth to promote sending cash to the archive. :)

Hey, we are working with Filecoin.ai on a pilot program where their new minors in Filecoin Discover will host some of our open data sets like Prelinger Films and .Gov web pages.

It will be an additional back up to our copies. We're hosting a DWeb Meetup to share the latest in Filecoin and Storj (two decentralized storage providers we're experimenting with.)

It's Wed (tomorrow) 5/13 at 10 am Pacific, 5 PM UTC https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dweb-meet-up-virtual-decentrali...

Sorry, "we" being the Internet Archive.

Oh cool! Will look into this!

Yeah, I am in the same boat - I have boatloads of unutilized bandwidth and storage space that I would love to contribute to a worthy cause like archive.org.

Ideally, I would like to be able to point at some RSS feed of torrents of relevant archive.org collections (whatever the curators believe popular enough to benefit from peer-to-peer distribution). I could then set a torrent client to donwload and seed everything on this feed.

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