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.
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.