Just consider the number of people who get paid to work on the fediverse compared to Facebook, and how much each group drives by car each day. Its a completely different magnitude. Same for construction and heating of office space or server farms.
Your scale argument is convincing as for global impact, but it would be interesting to know what is more energy-consuming at similar scale, as there are arguments for both sides (mainly the one of this article vs the overload of advertisement); so as to determine where it makes more sense ecologically for an individual to interact, maybe whether one refraining from voting posts and comments would have an ecological impat, that kind of things.
Just consider the number of people who get paid to work on the fediverse compared to Facebook, and how much each group drives by car each day. Its a completely different magnitude. Same for construction and heating of office space or server farms.
Your scale argument is convincing as for global impact, but it would be interesting to know what is more energy-consuming at similar scale, as there are arguments for both sides (mainly the one of this article vs the overload of advertisement); so as to determine where it makes more sense ecologically for an individual to interact, maybe whether one refraining from voting posts and comments would have an ecological impat, that kind of things.