Hmm i get where your friend is coming from but he’s literally falling for the corporate bait lol. he’s talking about “efficiency” like it’s a physics equation but forgetting how these companies actually run.

first of all big data centers are “efficient” on paper but they waste half their energy just on cooling and massive hvac systems. a small server or a vps slice doesn’t have that industrial overhead. and more importantly—the e-waste. google and meta bin their servers every 3 years to keep that “efficiency” high. self-hosters are out here running mastodon on 10-year-old laptops that were headed for a landfill. reusing “obsolete” tech is way greener than building a brand new “optimized” server from scratch. also look at what they’re actually processing. google/meta are data gluttons—they’re burning megawatts just to track your every click and serve you ads. an “inefficient” federated node that only handles your actual messages is still way better for the planet than a “perfect” machine processing petabytes of surveillance crap. it’s like saying a bus is more efficient than a bike because it carries more people, but the bus is driving in circles for no reason. but honestly the efficiency argument is a total distraction. like okay cool maybe a massive machine is 5% more optimized… so what? we’re talking about the literal infrastructure of human freedom. if we don’t build these decentralized networks now and get used to hosting our own shit we are literally handing the keys of our entire lives to 3 or 4 giant corporations and the state.

Once they have total control over every byte you send and every person you talk to “environmental friendliness” is gonna be the absolute last thing on your mind. you’ll be living in a digital cage where you can’t even organize a protest or share an opinion without an algorithm deleting it. id rather have a “less efficient” network that actually belongs to us than a perfectly green digital gulag where we have zero rights.

Worrying about the carbon footprint of a home server while the world is sliding into techno-fascism is like worrying about the fuel efficiency of the bus taking you to a labor camp. it’s completely missing the point. if we don’t have the infrastructure to resist today we won’t have a future to be “green” in tomorrow.

Self-hosted services are only serving their purpose, they’re not serving ads, crunching user data, training unwanted AI algorithms…

As an environmental science major (graduating in a few months) no and NO. I won’t touch up on the things others have commented already, but it’s ludicrous to suggest that grassroots internet spaces are more detrimental than large centralized corporate-owned platforms. Small internet efforts are a lot more conscious about how much space their activities take up, how much energy is spent to run it and how to minimize costs. Large internet platforms that are so spam-riddled and inflated with bullshit they will NEVER be more efficient. The companies that run them won’t benefit from real person and genuine content traffic. Not to mention that the data-hogging these companies are doing and the numerous background processes they’re running have a footprint of their own.

Tell this dingus to go outside… or rather inside an indie web community

That isnt always the case. A single large machine will consume a lot of resources and will produce a large amount of waste which is often the reason why companies dont want to deal with it responsibly. Theres less thought into the infrastructure and is geared more towards profit which explains my why companies will always irresponsibly pollute with their byproducts. Think landfills, no matter how much money they throw to pass on the problems to another company, they will all cut corners. This has a far larger impact on the ecological system than a smaller machine.

On the other hand, a smaller self hosted machine allows for the person/local group to properly plan out the infrastructure to not only efficiently use resources but to also effectively process/handle byproducts.

The computer itself isn’t the only element that makes up a centralized social media platform. Reddit, for example, isn’t just a random giant server in the middle of a desert; it requires tons of additional costs and inefficiencies to run that business, like entire buildings and hundreds or thousands of people.

When it comes to the electrical impact, concentration matters a lot, too. 100MWH consumed by a single data center stresses the infrastructure far more than the same total amount of power being consumed by 10,000 locations spread around the world.

Most large federated servers are hosted on VPS like solutions, not some old PC in someone’s closet. They are very similar to the types of machines that large companies host centralized social media on.

As for other self hosted services. The small amount of electricity I might use more than using Google services is more than made up for by stopping the societal damage companies like that do. They fund politicians that fight regulation which does way more harm to the environment.

Focusing on a minute downside compared to the holistic damage these companies do is short sighted.

Can’t remember the last time I poured millions into a fascist regime or gave technical support to a genocidal military. But yeah, I sipped a tiny bit more electricity last month.

Edit: also this issue is entirely solved by a push for clean energy and home solar. Both of which are heavily opposed by large corpo backed politicians.

There’s a reason people with lots of money want our society to build multi billion dollar power plants and stop people from owning their own power generation. Because those with wealth can build and profit from those greatly, and can’t make as much when people can afford to put solar panels on their homes.

Wow. This is literally the argument used by the megacorporation in book The Every (sequel to The Circle). It’s supposed to be social commentary and satire of greenwashing - the megacorporation claims only it is capable of saving the world by being “green” (which includes recycling people’s prized posessions like heirlooms and photographs into bricks for prisons)

the centralised big websites all seem intent on shoving gen ai into everything, which is far worse for the environment & climate than using smaller self-hosted networks that don’t use gen ai.

things could be re-assessed & done differently post-capitalism, but we’ve got to get to that stage first!

He may have a point, but as someone else pointed out, a lot of these self-hosted services are running on out of date equipment that wouldn’t be used for anything else.

I run all my Fediverse stuff on an old Dell R620 that a friend gave me. Mine is totally specialised for hosting… Yes, it is overkill for my ~10 users, but hopefully more friends will join. Also, it’s not the most efficient way of doing it - the device is probably 10 years old and uses ~130w 24/7. A newer NUC or equivalent would probably only use 40-50w. However, who else is going to use this machine? No company would touch it, “everything” is going cloudy, so it would either be stripped for parts and the rest dumped either in landfill or sent to some 3rd world country.

You can claim it’s a waste of electricity to use it, but a lot of energy and materials were used to create the server in the first place, and most of that will be lost, even with recycling.

People run Fediverse (and other services) on a Raspberry PI - fine for a couple of users, but too restrictive for my use. These things only use 5-20w, which is amazing.

My electricity supply is from a “green” supplier, and I have a local SolarPV system that powers the system when there is enough sun. Last summer I managed to run it for over a month using my local system only. There’s no reason that we can’t build more renewable sources of electricity. Here in the UK there’s a proposed 140 DCs in in the planning phases, which is ridiculous, all for AI BS.

Self-hosting isn’t for everyone of course - not every household should do this, but there’s no reason why groups of friends, families or “activity” groups couldn’t do this effectively.

It’s absolutely optimized for the long term - how many Google services have been discontinued when there are still users, just not enough to be profitable? Self-hosted services can run as long people are interested. A mail server created 20 years ago is still compatible and useable today because it uses ratified, slow-moving standards.

Thanks for these insights! Very very interesting.
As I’m keen to self-host as soon as I can afford it, I’ll bear this in mind. The immediate conclusion, in any case, is that large-scale infrastructure consumes far more energy than self-hosting ever could, and this is down to all the terrible choices they’ve made that led us to abandon them.
As for the long term, having read your replies, I find it interesting to think that this minor drawback can be resolved or managed through green energy decisions and simply better management of needs. I was reading the article posted earlier on ‘The small tech neighbourhood’ and I can see that all of this is, on the contrary, very proactive and sustainable.
Thanks very much – all this information is really useful (and should be widely shared, for all beginners like me or potential future beginners like my friend) !

Honestly, It’s sometimes hard to have a constructed point of view to encourage the federated way when the big corps have had so much power on our reflections… Like I know I’m fighting against this or that but the reasons why are somehow blurred, and even if my senses tell me something is wrong, i still have to search and ask questions to get words to support my ideas. The words don’t come naturally, and it’s frustrating when the opposite message is constantly being hammered home everywhere

Honestly, I think your friend is right, it’s a question of economy of scale. As you scale up there will be less and less wasted resources in overhead. Once you reach the scale where you need hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of servers to operate your site you’d likely be able to fairly efficiently dimension the amount of servers you have so that each server is pretty efficiently utilized. Youd only need to keep enough spare capacity to handle traffic bursts, which would also become smaller compared to the baseline load the larger your site becomes.

Realistically most self-hosted setups will be mostly idle in terms of CPU capacity needed, with bursts as soon as the few users accesses the services.

As for datacenters using optimized machines there is probably some truth to it. Looking at server CPUs they usually constrain power to each core to add more cores to the CPU. Compared to consumer CPUs where at least high-end CPUs crank the power to get the most single-core performance. This depends heavily on what kind of hardware you are self-hosting on though. If you are using a raspberry-pi your of course going to be in favor, same is probably true for miniPCs. However if you’re using your old gaming computer with an older high-end CPU, your power efficiency is very likely sub-optimal.

As a “fun” fact/anecdote, I recently calculated that my home server which pulls ~160W comes out as 115kWh in a month. This is a bit closer than I would like to the 150-200 kWh I spend on charging my plug-in hybrid each month… To be fair though I had not invested much in power efficiency of this computer, running the old gaming computer approach and a lot of HDDs.

That said there is plenty of other advantages with self-hosting, but I’m not sure the environmental angle works out as better overall.