Is decentralization killing the environment? What do you think and why?

  • @wazowski@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    322 years ago

    medium articles containing 800 bytes of text that weigh 7 megabytes will kill the environment long before that surely

  • @ree@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    28
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    What a bunch of bullshit.

    They eco footprint of a mastodon thread is vastly lower than one of Facebook or Twitter

    Let me tell you why: there is no advertising on mastodon. Online advertising require huge resource from complex “AI” algorithm to the exchange infrastructure.

    Fuck surveillance capitalism and fuck that guy, how dense is he to compare SSL to bitcoin?

    edit:typo

  • poVoq
    link
    fedilink
    24
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I think I have seen that guy around the Hubzilla Fediverse for a while so I don’t think this is a quick hit-piece of someone having no idea about the Fediverse. But the headline is definitely a bit sensationalist.

    Anyways, of course a Gemini site or so will have a lower environmental footprint than a Lemmy instance. There are trade-offs between functionality/usability and energy/hardware efficiency for sure.

    The question is when does it become too much?

    Obviously Bitcoin is at the far end of useless waste of resources, but closer to the Fediverse there are some projects that are also questionably over-engineered in that regard.

    Matrix for example comes to mind, which replicates huge amounts of data and constantly tries to merge server data-bases (at quite significant expense of compute resources) for a largely hypothetical usage scenario where distributed chat-rooms are of vital importance.

    And in the ActivityPub space those projects that try to implement chats or other fast moving communication methods over a protocol that was primarily designed for slow personal message posting are probably also wasting resources (and reinventing the wheel).

    On the positive side, decentralization can help resource efficiency by making it easy to self-host and thus reusing existing server capacity and reuse old hardware. ActivityPub projects like Epicyon or in general efficient chat protocols like XMPP or IRC are definitely saving resources through decentralization.

  • @bashrc@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    182 years ago

    This is a rather disingenuous article trying to make the implication that the fediverse is comparable (or worse) in electricity use to cryptocurrency mining or to the centralized BigTech systems. That’s far from being the case.

    The centralized systems do more than just display a timeline chronologically. They also do data mining in the background to put users into advertising categories. On Facebook I think literally every keystroke is data mined. Plus of course there is the serving of ads which takes large amounts of bandwidth - something which doesn’t happen in the fediverse to any significant extent.

    I maintain an ActivityPub server called Epicyon, and being low on electricity use is one of its goals. You can run it on a Rpi and not have it make much of a ding in electricity bills. This type of system can scale horizontally rather than vertically like the BigTech systems do.

  • @sexy_peach@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    142 years ago

    Since the system is “decentralized”, this message is copied to all subscribers. If the poster has 100 “friends” then 100 copies go out, similar to an email with 100 recipients. However, the message continues to be replicated to subscribers of the subscribers.

    That’s just plain wrong, it only gets replicated to subscribers of the subscribers if they boost it. Which is completely fine, I don’t think all of this is a problem.

    Their test of simply following everyone is really dumb, since 8000 follows are like an instance of 100 people (maybe even more, I don’t know how much the follows tend to overlap, if people follow the same accounts)… I wonder which footprint his medium article has.

    • @bashrc@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      52 years ago

      It’s not the first time that I’ve seen a criticism like this article, so this might be a talking point amongst a certain crowd. The slight of hand is that they never mention the shared inbox, or the additional processing which the centralized systems do to serve ads and categorize users.

    • Liwott
      link
      fedilink
      22 years ago

      we’re not really off fedi here though 😀

      • smallcircles
        link
        fedilink
        02 years ago

        Yeah, I was actually thinking that while writing, ha ha. But I also didn’t want to say its on Mastodon either, as it is not just them. So fedi timelines then 🤔

        • Liwott
          link
          fedilink
          02 years ago

          Well, it’s as much on Mastodon as this one is on Lemmy. Both threads appear similarly in my Friendica timeline (funnily enough, there even appeared just one after the other when you first commented). Maybe one should say “via Mastodon”?

          • smallcircles
            link
            fedilink
            02 years ago

            That might be better. I try to avoid because so many people think that fediverse === mastodon, though.

            • Liwott
              link
              fedilink
              22 years ago

              This is Lemmy, that is Mastodon, both are on Fedi and both are accesible from other parts of Fedi. I think that introducing the asymmetry in calling one fedi contributes to fueling the confusion.

  • SudoDnfDashY
    link
    fedilink
    12 years ago

    I would like to find the author of this article and slowly, yet, nonviolently terrorize them.