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The Slow Fedi Movement: Toward a Green, Independent, and Equitable Fediverse (thedabbler.patatas.ca)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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