The environmental footprint of social media hosting: What about Lemmy and the like?
The environmental footprint of social media hosting: What about Lemmy and the like?
A growing body of literature on waste and discard studies has crafted a powerful critique of waste management and politics (Callén and Sánchez Criado 2015; Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022; Gille and Lepawsky 2022; Ek and Johansson 2020). In today’s dominant waste regime, waste is naturalized as a burden
Social media platforms need a lot of computing and storage power provided by energy-hungry data centres that constantly have to upgrade their hardware, spitting out vast amounts of e-waste. This is particularly true of commercial platforms with their ML-driven ad systems. The fall of Twitter and Reddit would be beneficial in that regard.
But what about Fediverse systems? The link discusses Mastodon, but that's only one example. Would it be possible to host Lemmy instances in a sustainable way? With solar power? And what would it imply, materially and socially?
I have resources like the Low-Tech Magazine in mind, which uses solar power to host a website. The downtime is part of the adventure. Or we'd have to deploy a solar protocol to use the earth's rotation creatively and for cooperation.
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While I was looking for an instance I saw one that said it was run on 99% renewables! So unless they’re lying I’d imagine it’s possible.
Nearly every data-center in Europe claims that. They use the same electricity as everyone else, but have a contract with a utility company that tracks the amount of renewable energy they feed into the grid (or buy on the energy market) so that on average those claims are technically true.
But of course with the grid being mostly nonrenewable this means little.
Iceland has a clean grid and Norway is very close to 99%. If you allow for nuclear Sweden also comes close, as does Switzerland.
Can you share the instance? I've also come across a few Mastodon instances that do the same.
Then I wonder how the material remains of hardware are addressed by providers. Or if virtual servers would be a better solution anyway.
How do virtual servers help?
Perhaps for medium- to large-size solutions, for example: bundling multiple fediverse instances in one cooperative data centre. Virtuality allows for efficiently allocating resources where they are needed the most.
*Edit: Turns out I almost joined that particular instance. Awesome name, too. But Canada is quite far away from my home. And home-y it shall be.
turns out it’s one of the more popular ones! though, I’ve done a quick search and I can’t see where it’s sourced.
Which instance would that be?