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Decentralization is Killing Our Environment


Is decentralization killing the environment? What do you think and why?
in reply to Ilia ❄️

Since the system is “decentralized”, this message is copied to all subscribers. If the poster has 100 “friends” then 100 copies go out, similar to an email with 100 recipients. However, the message continues to be replicated to subscribers of the subscribers.
That's just plain wrong, it only gets replicated to subscribers of the subscribers if they boost it. Which is completely fine, I don't think all of this is a problem.

Their test of simply following everyone is really dumb, since 8000 follows are like an instance of 100 people (maybe even more, I don't know how much the follows tend to overlap, if people follow the same accounts)... I wonder which footprint his medium article has.
in reply to sexy_peach

It's not the first time that I've seen a criticism like this article, so this might be a talking point amongst a certain crowd. The slight of hand is that they never mention the shared inbox, or the additional processing which the centralized systems do to serve ads and categorize users.
in reply to Ilia ❄️

@rhiaro recently ask about this on fedi too: https://toot.cat/@rhiaro/108130076653360786
in reply to smallcircles

we're not really off fedi here though 😀
in reply to Liwott

Yeah, I was actually thinking that while writing, ha ha. But I also didn't want to say its on Mastodon either, as it is not just them. So fedi timelines then 🤔
in reply to smallcircles

Well, it's as much on Mastodon as this one is on Lemmy. Both threads appear similarly in my Friendica timeline (funnily enough, there even appeared just one after the other when you first commented). Maybe one should say "via Mastodon"?
in reply to Liwott

That might be better. I try to avoid because so many people think that fediverse === mastodon, though.
in reply to smallcircles

This is Lemmy, that is Mastodon, both are on Fedi and both are accesible from other parts of Fedi. I think that introducing the asymmetry in calling one fedi contributes to fueling the confusion.
in reply to Liwott

Oh certainly, with that I wholly agree 😀
Unknown parent

Liwott
Is there anything to back that opinion up?

Dochyo doesn't like this.

in reply to Liwott

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.

Dessalines doesn't like this.

in reply to Ilia ❄️

What a bunch of bullshit.

They eco footprint of a mastodon thread is vastly lower than one of Facebook or Twitter

Let me tell you why: there is no advertising on mastodon. Online advertising require huge resource from complex "AI" algorithm to the exchange infrastructure.

Fuck surveillance capitalism and fuck that guy, how dense is he to compare SSL to bitcoin?

edit:typo
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Unknown parent

Liwott
Energy production and energy consumption are two orthogonal problems. Many fediverse servers are powered by fossil fuel energy. Many are powered by green energy (and # is a great project ! ), but in a time where the green energy supplies are still insufficient, that also means that other things have to be supplied with fossils.

I am not claiming what you said is not true, I'm just asking whether there is any number that makes you say that or whether you just want to spread the dogma that because the fediverse is good, it has to be good in every aspect.
in reply to guojing

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.
in reply to Ilia ❄️

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.
in reply to Ilia ❄️

I would like to find the author of this article and slowly, yet, nonviolently terrorize them.

don't like this