Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1y

I wonder if the fediverse is worse for the planet than Twitter was? Surely a few massive data centers use less water and power than thousands of servers spread out all over the place, right? Not to mention the extra internet traffic, content and infrastructure duplication etc. If we really care about the environment, shouldn’t we be championing massive centralization?

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modulux @modulux@node.isonomia.net

1y

@fastfinge Very hard to measure, and the fedi does not do a lot of things centralised alternatives do such as surveillance and advertising, which does take up considerable resources and storage. But probably per user it is less efficient, I would think.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1y

@modulux Also, how many of us massively overprovision our servers? I know I’m guilty of that. Estimating exactly how much ram or CPU a federated service requires is a skill, and I don’t have it. I’m not a business, so I have no economic pressure to squeeze out every last drop of performance either.

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modulux @modulux@node.isonomia.net

1y

@fastfinge On the other hand, I run a lot of stuff on the same server I run fedi stuff on. Email, websites, IRC bots... And it runs on bare metal, no container or virtual machines or cloud indirection. So not sure how much of a factor that may be.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1y

@modulux Same, but I had to containerize everything for security and ease of maintenance. I don’t think docker is too bad. However, it does mean my resource needs are wildly unpredictable to me.

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modulux @modulux@node.isonomia.net

1y

@fastfinge Anyway, one thing I agree on is the replication is excessive, and it's also a cost that could be significantly reduced. Imagine images and so on stored on a DHT where everyone puts in some storage and can retrieve from it. Only one copy of a file would need to be stored. (Realistically, say 5 copies for redundancy.) I know there are people interested in making something like this happen.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

1y

@modulux Sounds like IPFS?

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modulux @modulux@node.isonomia.net

1y

@fastfinge Yes, something like it. Not sure IPFS is exaclty the right way to do it, but certainly the same sort of concept.

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