stefanlaser

There is a nice book on this topic, Against Purity:

Why contamination and compromise might be a starting point for doing something, instead of a reason to give up.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity

But the last comment on the global south is odd, for many reasons. Empathy and support was on your mind, I suppose. 🤓

I agree with most of this. And our little Lemmy servers will certainly not count. We definitely should not care about individual consumers, or rather, it should not be about blaming people. It's more about experiments and learning. And fun.

However, what I would like to do is to complicate the data centre narrative. Yes, data centres are superply efficient. But this is a relative measure. Companies demand exponentially more computing and storage power; more capacity to process data for 'intelligent' applications and provide ads.

Ergo, the landlords of the internet build massive new data centres that do indeed need a considerable amount of electricity, water and all the new, resource heavy high tech chips were reading about in the news. Corporate social media platforms are part of this, too. 2 per cent of current global electricity demand comes from data centres. And scholars agree that this share is growing. But, yeah. This is an interesting field of research, because it's quite difficult when it comes to the concrete numbers.

So this post here is a typical "let's improve our society somewhat" contribution.

Informative and unfortunate. Economic growth is the single goal of the CPV and guarantees its power. Climate and ecological claims endanger the social order, so 👨‍⚖️

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

I agree with this. Efficiency vs cooling the infrastructure and updating hardware after a maximum of 5 years. Still, I'm not 100% sure about statistics. Do you know of any comparative studies or the like?

Just one fitting side note. We had an interview with a local data centre manager and during the discussion, we somehow started talking about alternative setups, like a raspberry pi server. The interviewee reminded us of the efficiency of their virtual servers. He even gave us a tour through their digital dashboards and showcased the 1 watt used by a server (vs roughly 4 watts of a Pi, with much less performance).

This is not to say that low-tech is not the way to go. Less mining and hazardous work conditions are always good and need no measurement for emphasis.

Perhaps for medium- to large-size solutions, for example: bundling multiple fediverse instances in one cooperative data centre. Virtuality allows for efficiently allocating resources where they are needed the most.

*Edit: Turns out I almost joined that particular instance. Awesome name, too. But Canada is quite far away from my home. And home-y it shall be.

Can you share the instance? I've also come across a few Mastodon instances that do the same.

Then I wonder how the material remains of hardware are addressed by providers. Or if virtual servers would be a better solution anyway.

That’s a (probably foolish) dream that could be compatible with exponential growth beyond what is available on Earth.

Sounds like a Solarpunk novel to be written. Let's put all incineration activities away. Yet, space colonization is here and serves capital accumulation, first and foremost. There's also the tiny part where rockets have to be shot to outer space with a little bit of energy and waste heat.