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.
All in all, these things are not energy-hungry. It probably costs more energy to display these pages on a big screen than doing all the data processing required. When it comes to energy efficiency, huge “energy-hungry” datacenter are usually more efficient: they have the ability to do economy of scale, and for them, a Wh gained is money gained so they are usually well designed in that respect and keep getting more efficient.
I have a friend who is really serious about energy savings and about having a sustainable lifestyle. And who does the maths and his homework. His advice was that IT is probably the last of your concerns. Insulate. Insulate your water-heater, insulate your house. Find your main source of wasted energy. It probably won’t be your webserver and by several orders of magnitude.
I agree with most of this. And our little Lemmy servers will certainly not count. We definitely should not care about individual consumers, or rather, it should not be about blaming people. It’s more about experiments and learning. And fun.
However, what I would like to do is to complicate the data centre narrative. Yes, data centres are superply efficient. But this is a relative measure. Companies demand exponentially more computing and storage power; more capacity to process data for ‘intelligent’ applications and provide ads.
Ergo, the landlords of the internet build massive new data centres that do indeed need a considerable amount of electricity, water and all the new, resource heavy high tech chips were reading about in the news. Corporate social media platforms are part of this, too. 2 per cent of current global electricity demand comes from data centres. And scholars agree that this share is growing. But, yeah. This is an interesting field of research, because it’s quite difficult when it comes to the concrete numbers.
So this post here is a typical “let’s improve our society somewhat” contribution.