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.
Fair point and while I don’t want to sidetrack from it — how much is the Fediverse’s energy usage compared to those of AI services or cryptocurrency farms?
I’m all for scaling down our resource consumption and finding environmentally friendly alternatives, but it has to be across the board. It’s no use that a small segment minimise their expenditure if the biggest culprits continue and expand their exploitative behaviour.
Practically 0.
That’s my intuition too. Would like to see sources to back it up though.
Well this site says that the bitcoin network uses at least 91 TWh annually.
According to fediverse.observer, there’s roughly 21000 Fediverse servers online.
Let’s just assume that a server on the Fediverse uses 500W. That’s quite a high estimate btw, but we can overestimate, it’s fine.
That gives roughly 0.09 TWh annually, or about 0.1% of the bitcoin network. And remember that’s an overestimate and remember that that only considers bitcoin and no other cryptocurrencies.
How about we do it because it makes us feel good, morally? How about we do it because we want to set a good example?
This whole “I won’t change until those who are worse than I am change,” is so juvenile to me.