this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
149 points (94.1% liked)

Fediverse

27828 readers
331 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Xylinna@lemmy.world
MrCenny@lemmy.world
TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
automodbeta@lemmy.world
woelkchen@lemmy.world
149
The Slow Fedi Movement: Toward a Green, Independent, and Equitable Fediverse (thedabbler.patatas.ca)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by smallpatatas@lemm.ee to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
25 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The practical suggestions sound good but the rest of the blog post makes this sound like a much bigger issue than it is, I feel.

There are simply not enough servers or activity on the Fediverse to have to worry about this at this point, if you ask me. It could for sure be better with regards to environmental concerns, but there's a lot more pressing issues I think.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I think it is a pretty major issue. A single-user instance shouldn't need more than 100 GB. The internet is too bloated, which is a democratic problem as well as an environmental one.

It's of some importance for the Fediverse in particular, as we want to have a system of many independent instances with low running costs and minimal environmental footprints. A bloated piece of software running on one centralized server is different from it running on thousands of decentralized ones, and higher running costs means that instances are more likely to disappear rendering the network more fragile.

Of course it's not the biggest problem out there, but I think it's important enough that it should be a priority.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

A single user instance doesn't need nearly 100GB, so that's fine. My own instance which is not even single user doesn't even use 100GB yet.

I don't think it's as bad as the post makes it sound. But I mean yes, of course efficiency and costs are important to optimize for.

[–] Flax_vert@feddit.uk 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Honestly I think a single user instance should be lightweight enough to run on a Raspi. Even having multiple. A lot of them don't need their own frontends either. Can just use an app