Is there a market/community/discord for people to share/swap disk space they have on their own servers/always up computers, to use a target for their duplicacy backups?
I’m thinking of something like the “P2P backup” solution that was included in CrashPlan, a while ago, where you could backup your computer to a friend, and let that friend backup his computer to yours.
I could see myself offering x TB of space on my server, if that would mean I’d have x TB of backup space on someone’s else server…
There was an old now defunct service that allowed users to share space on their machines (I keep forgetting its name).
Today however – sharing space would be more expensive and provide lower quality of service compared to commercial cloud storage that do that on a large scale.
And paying with 1TB of space on any machine to get 1TB of pace elsewhere – thats way too expensive a price to pay.
As an example 1 TB of space of redundant storage on my nas cost me what, ($600/5years + $200/8tb/5years)/12month per month (cost of appliance over warranty period, plus cost of TB of drive space over warranty period, ignoring redundancy) which is over $10/month/TB, not counting power, connectivity, managing that storage, etc. Why would I pay that if I can get BackBlaze B2, which is not only 2x cheaper but provides much higher quality of service, simpler support structure and additional services?
Storage that you rent out you cannot use and can’t really easily reclaim back when you need it, for the whole scheme to be useful.
Basically, I don’t see the point in doing this.
Edit: it was called “Wuala”
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Do you mean “give someone an empty folder on your server in which they init a storage” or “here is an already-init storage which i’m using, just add your machines here as well”?
I guess you are referring to the first option.
If it were the second, if the same 
storage is shared, everybody can see/restore everybody else’s files and for me, this would be a showstopper.
There is this issue: Per Snapshot ID encryption, which would make sharing the same storage (hence benefitting de-duplication) safe.
For sure the first, for everyone to be able to choose their own encryption password!
I don’t think there would be much benefits for the second; I don’t expect people’s important files to contain a lot of duplicates…
The idea would be that you could “rent” remote hard drive space, but instead of paying with $, you’d pay by offering the same service to your “partner”.