This idea is inspired by nixos-mailserver. It was so easy to spin up the mailserver after changing some DNS records and putting in some settings. I thought it might be a good idea to do the same for services that need public, decentralized infrastructure to support. Some ideas include
- Tor relay, or exit node
- Encrypted messaging nodes. It looks like SimpleX chat relies on SMP servers to relay communication
- Crypto miners (I know, I know, but you understand how it fits the “public contribution” usecase)
- Search engines like searxng (I currently use a public instance)
- Libredirect services, like proxy clients for social media
Maybe federated services, but those require more than just the software running on the public internet. Those require moderation and long term maintenance. Ideally, the services in this config would be ephemeral.
Does this sound like a good idea? Would you spin one of these up on a $10 VPS? I understand that this is the NixOS community, not necessarily the privacy community, but I figured thered be overlap.
What other services do you think would be applicable?
Enabling searxng on a NixOS instance is trivial and works well. What are you missing here ?
For it to contribute to the public, I would also want some sort of way to help the admin notify the oublic about it. I was even thinking that this would come with its own cli tool to check that the instance was visible on the open internet, and the present in public instance lists like searx.space. In this case, building and configuration is alrwady handled by NixOS, which is nice. I havent looked into others.
It’s an interesting thought and I’ve thought before it would be nice if I could pay for an exit node but not be legally responsible or have to maintain it. I’d pay $10 for that. I think crypto miner is where you lost me. Big crypto fan, but mining on a VPS is a bad idea. You’ll consume a ton of resources and power and generate next to nothing in terms of coins.
I’m pretty ignorant on crypto, I just knew that it was important to have many mining to increase transaction times, decrease transactions costs, decentralize proof of work, etc. And practically you’re right, might be a good way to absolutely ruin the performance of the server.
