Recently, I was chatting with a friend, and we were talking about ‘de-Googling’, federated networks and self-hosted services. As I was listing the benefits and my largely positive experience with them (the Fediverse for the most part), my friend pointed out that it isn’t an environmentally friendly solution, nor is it optimised for the long term. He told me that it requires more machines that consume more energy than a single large one, as these machines aren’t specialised for hosting services. What’s your view on the argument that ‘several small machines that consume more energy are less optimised and eco-friendly than a single large one built and designed for that purpose’? I realise that the large machine goes hand in hand with techno-fascists and that they are the real problem, but what if we were to look at this from a purely technical, forward-looking perspective on a clean future? How would you respond to this ?
He may have a point, but as someone else pointed out, a lot of these self-hosted services are running on out of date equipment that wouldn’t be used for anything else.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.