The environmental footprint of social media hosting: Tinkering with Mastodon
www.easst.net
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.

  •  pwacata   ( @pwacata@beehaw.org ) English
    6•1 year ago

    Also omitted - the amount of speculative buying for planned capacity that never actually happens. I worked for one of the big tech companies for several years, and more specialized hardware especially (ML accelerators) were spun up with the notion of “we don’t know who will need these, but we don’t want to not have them if they’re needed”. Cue massive amounts of expensive hardware sitting plugged in and idle for months as dev teams scramble to adopt their stuff to new hardware that has just enough difference in behavior and requirements as to make it hard to migrate over.

    Also also, there’s a bunch of “when in doubt, throw it out” - automated systems detecting hardware failure that automatically decommission it after a couple strikes. False positive signals were common, so a lot gets thrown out despite being perfectly fine.