The Fediverse - especially the microblogging side of it - has deep issues when it comes to environmental sustainability.
And the high resource requirements, which result from an incredible level of redundancy, aren’t just bad environmentally: they make running a server more costly, and increase our reliance on Big Tech’s infrastructure.
I wrote about all this, along with some suggestions for how we can improve things somewhat.
Not completely on topic, but, in the spirit of reducing and changing consumption, some of you may be interested in the Gemini protocol. It’s supports a version of the web that’s simpler by design and focused primarily on text-first posts. Folks on the network like to compare it to the early web. I recently learned about it from this tutorial.
There’s not a ton there right now, and it’s not going to replace the web as we know it, but it’s worth a look just for fun.
The protocol is compatible with ActivityPub, so you can also have federated Gemini apps. I haven’t tried out tootik because microblogging isn’t really my thing, but it’s interesting that it exists.
Nice. Yeah Gemini is pretty cool, and that actually reminds me, I have to publish this piece on my gemlog as well ;)
Haven’t tried tootik either but thanks for pointing me to it, will check it out!
Very cool! If you want to post a link or message me, I’d love to check out your gemlog. I thought this piece was really interesting.
I’m just getting into self hosting, and the “storage waste” of all this duplicated content has been on my mind a lot, but I hadn’t really considered the energy costs or the feasibility for folks with data caps, slow Internet connections, and so on.
I absolutely love the idea of federated applications. It would be great if they someday became the dominant way of running things. But, even if we could get every user interested, I haven’t really put in enough thought or research to know whether running these applications at huge scales would be feasible or desirable. It’s great to see folks talking about the problems we’ll run into and how we can be better than current big tech companies about considering the impact of our choices.
Anyway, thanks for the well-written and insightful piece.
Thanks! Yeah tbh the gemlog is really just a mirror of the blog, but for the record it’s gemini://gemini.patatas.ca