The Fediverse - especially the microblogging side of it - has deep issues when it comes to environmental sustainability.
And the high resource requirements, which result from an incredible level of redundancy, aren’t just bad environmentally: they make running a server more costly, and increase our reliance on Big Tech’s infrastructure.
I wrote about all this, along with some suggestions for how we can improve things somewhat.
Not completely on topic, but, in the spirit of reducing and changing consumption, some of you may be interested in the Gemini protocol. It’s supports a version of the web that’s simpler by design and focused primarily on text-first posts. Folks on the network like to compare it to the early web. I recently learned about it from this tutorial.
There’s not a ton there right now, and it’s not going to replace the web as we know it, but it’s worth a look just for fun.
The protocol is compatible with ActivityPub, so you can also have federated Gemini apps. I haven’t tried out tootik because microblogging isn’t really my thing, but it’s interesting that it exists.
Nice. Yeah Gemini is pretty cool, and that actually reminds me, I have to publish this piece on my gemlog as well ;)
Haven’t tried tootik either but thanks for pointing me to it, will check it out!
Very cool! If you want to post a link or message me, I’d love to check out your gemlog. I thought this piece was really interesting.
I’m just getting into self hosting, and the “storage waste” of all this duplicated content has been on my mind a lot, but I hadn’t really considered the energy costs or the feasibility for folks with data caps, slow Internet connections, and so on.
I absolutely love the idea of federated applications. It would be great if they someday became the dominant way of running things. But, even if we could get every user interested, I haven’t really put in enough thought or research to know whether running these applications at huge scales would be feasible or desirable. It’s great to see folks talking about the problems we’ll run into and how we can be better than current big tech companies about considering the impact of our choices.
Anyway, thanks for the well-written and insightful piece.
Thanks! Yeah tbh the gemlog is really just a mirror of the blog, but for the record it’s gemini://gemini.patatas.ca
Good points, makes me think of how good lightweight RSS readers were at accomplishing the same kinds of content aggregation goals, and worked well even over 56k modems.
I agree that we should reduce energy consumption wherever possible, but we also need to look at the big picture. The entire fediverse is just a tiny fraction of the energy consumption of the internet. Way more energy is needed for AI and other big tech bullshit.
I recommend watching this awesome video, as well as the updated version of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ
How much of the power consumption is from the servers and how much is from the clients?
That’s a good question. The best answer is, I don’t know!
But if I had to guess, based on the small amount I’ve learned:
larger servers most likely benefit from economies of scale. They’ll be using CDNs, and will often have several people on their server following any given remote account, rather than just one. So the per-client energy use is almost certainly lower than for small servers.
But it’s still tough to know whether it’s the client or server using more energy. IIRC with video streaming, the end user’s device was a big factor in overall consumption - but it’s not like the server is chugging away 24/7 fetching media for you like a Fediverse server is.
For single-user servers, or servers with only a few accounts, I expect the server (and all the network infrastructure in between two servers) is doing a lot more work than the client(s) - unless it’s like, the server is on a raspberry Pi and the client is running on a powerful desktop for a lot of the day, or something. Again, many factors at play.
Really though, the question I start to ask in all this is more about, which parts of the system are the most difficult to justify?
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What I feel is missing from the practical suggestions section: why cache images at all? They should be stored on the server they were uploaded to, and nowhere else. The image URL would be attached to the post, and could then be used by clients to fetch the image from the original server.
I thought lemmy did this, but it seems not (any more?).
I hear you on this - Akkoma does this by default, but the issue there is, let’s say someone on a tiny server posts an image, even a relatively small one - if it gets boosted by an account with 10k followers, that small server will effectively get DDOSed, assuming enough of those clients are online.
