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.

  • dxdydzEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I dunno about Lemmy, but there are some lightweight Mastodon-compatible servers under development on GitHub.

    Also, I saw some tests from a Mastodon admin that showed huge decrease in server power by simply decreasing the retention time for cached media from the default. I forget the numbers, but I remember being shocked by them.

    • starringatinfrastructureOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I also plan to experiment with this (but, well, time and stuff). Do you have any clues on how to find the projects? There’s probably a lot of network traffic that can be saved through tweaking