The environmental footprint of social media hosting: Tinkering with Mastodon
www.easst.net
A growing body of literature on waste and discard studies has crafted a powerful critique of waste management and politics (Callén and Sánchez Criado 2015; Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022; Gille and Lepawsky 2022; Ek and Johansson 2020). In today’s dominant waste regime, waste is naturalized as a burden

Social media platforms need a lot of computing and storage power provided by energy-hungry data centres that constantly have to upgrade their hardware, spitting out vast amounts of e-waste. This is particularly true of commercial platforms with their ML-driven ad systems. The fall of Twitter and Reddit would be beneficial in that regard.

But what about Fediverse systems? The link discusses Mastodon, but that’s only one example. Would it be possible to host Lemmy instances in a sustainable way? With solar power? And what would it imply, materially and socially?

I have resources like the Low-Tech Magazine in mind, which uses solar power to host a website. The downtime is part of the adventure. Or we’d have to deploy a solar protocol to use the earth’s rotation creatively and for cooperation.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    What is often omitted is that large centralized data-centers need a lot of cooling. Due to efficiency improvements this has somewhat improved lately, but it used to be up to 60% of the total electricity used.

    Smaller decentralized servers don’t need nearly as much of it as they can easily dissipate heat to their cooler surrounding even if they use older less efficient equipment.

    Thus up-cycling older server hardware in decentralized locations can save a lot of energy if you consider the entire life cycle of the equipment.

    • laser@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I agree with this. Efficiency vs cooling the infrastructure and updating hardware after a maximum of 5 years. Still, I’m not 100% sure about statistics. Do you know of any comparative studies or the like?

      Just one fitting side note. We had an interview with a local data centre manager and during the discussion, we somehow started talking about alternative setups, like a raspberry pi server. The interviewee reminded us of the efficiency of their virtual servers. He even gave us a tour through their digital dashboards and showcased the 1 watt used by a server (vs roughly 4 watts of a Pi, with much less performance).

      This is not to say that low-tech is not the way to go. Less mining and hazardous work conditions are always good and need no measurement for emphasis.