That is a very fair point. There are ecological costs to electronics manufacturing and waste that are not as well understood as lifecycle energy consumption. It is much more complex and appears much harder to solve than energy consumption … so maybe that’s why.

Interesting article (my French is not good, but with the help of translation I get the idea). Thank you for sharing.

Ahh so, I think there is room for confusion. Fediverse is “p2p” only in the context of the (federated) servers. PeerTube/Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. are still “centralized” in that your instance (e.g. programming.dev) is shared with many other users (possibly worldwide). This potentially increases the cost of delivery, because a user still has to find a server, and may select one that is ideologically, rather than physically, close to them. Because YouTube’s servers are ideologically homogeneous, there is no reason to find a server other than the one physically closest to you, and thus the cheapest to stream from. So delivery costs to the end user’s terminal should be even higher for PeerTube as compared to YouTube!

A completely flat, p2p architecture potentially eliminates almost all of the cost of delivery, but it does introduce other costs, and doesn’t eliminate the need for video encoding. I don’t have any research available, but I feel confident it will not be simple to compare with centralized services like Fediverse or traditional web services. I will keep my eye out for research.

There are many reasons to switch to Fediverse. I’m simply arguing that “efficiency” is not one of them :)

If you’ve got some scientific papers handy, I’d love to see them!

The point I’m trying to make is that YouTube has an incentive to design their system to not let traffic travel further than it has to (users closer to a data center hosting the content they want will get it faster). They build data centers close to where their users live. Even then, delivery is likely less energy-intensive than video transcoding, meaning large, specialized data centers make a lot of sense for that task. They then distribute transcoded content to smaller, regional servers to improve user experience … again, specialized systems for a specialized task.

This means that YouTube has already distributed their system across many different servers in many different regions around the world, so in many ways, they already take advantage of the efficiency benefits of p2p, but they can carefully coordinate to reduce overall costs in a way that p2p can’t (yet).

But the Fediverse will lag in efficiency for exactly the reason you pointed out: it’s running on low tech, general-purpose hardware. Energy usage has the largest environmental impact by far. Hardware that is specialized (like Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) or newer will always outperform general or old hardware.

The Internet is not a “series of tubes” … It’s a packet-switched messaging network. The fact that billions of computers are “connected” to a single address doesn’t really mean much other than they’ve exchanged some messages within the last several minutes (or some other arbitrary amount of time).

You’re not wrong: any sizeable web service must distribute to several servers and data centers for performance (e.g. response times and data throughput), and for resiliency (e.g. if a server fails then another one can take over). But the difference is these data centers have a financial incentive to maximize efficiency in both hardware costs and electricity usage (which includes cooling, etc.). Folks self-hosting Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. servers in their basement have much less incentive, and so less effort is put into eeking out every ounce of capability per dollar. Even hosting on AWS/Google/Azure/etc is never going to beat a bespoke data center dedicated to one particular application.

Although they don’t necessarily publish this information, at least a data center can accurately measure its energy usage (which tends to dwarf hardware costs…). Also newer hardware will always outperform old hardware per energy usage. For either aspect I can’t say the same for the server in my basement … It’s 10 year-old hardware running on the same circuit as the beer fridge next to it. I have no idea how much electricity it uses to handle like 2 users. It’s a glorified space heater.

It’s all about trade-offs. Fediverse applications value open standardization, availability, and long-term resiliency over efficiency, performance, and short-term profits.

The Fediverse is great, but in the short/mid-term, efficiency and ecological impact aren’t things i would expect it to excel at.

I’m pretty sure you got that backwards … Distributed systems like Lemmy and PeerTube rely on large amounts of redundancy and duplication. In general, centralized systems are going to be more efficient by default. YouTube is an “ecological nightmare” simply because it’s absolutely massive. If PeerTube grows to anywhere near the same scale, you can be sure it will far eclipse total energy usage (and also be harder to measure).