Sam ButlerJun 27, 2024

The Internet Can Run Without Data Centers 🔊

Any people on the East Coast want to set-up a Garage cluster and start serving pages? Get in touch, for real! (Mainly looking for people in Virginia for now!)

Garage: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Togepage: https://tog.page

Community Media: https://communitymedia.video (@ajroach42)

Undeniable: https://undeniablenetwork.com

#DataCenters #Energy #Permacomputing #Network #Tech #Online #Internet #Server #DataCenter #Water #Climate #Environment #Pollution #Degrowth #Alternative #Drought #Pollution #ClimateChange

The Garage team - An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting

An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting

Garage
Show threadAsharasJun 27, 2024

@sambutlerUS @ajroach42 love the idea but Togepage's presentation is either completely dumb or utterly dishonest:
"Imagine an Internet running on energy and servers that we operate — not data centers powered by fossil fuels and the water from our rivers."

Where does the energy to power their homes come from? F'ing Narnia?

Show threadSam ButlerJun 27, 2024
@asharas Solar panels? There are a lot of people who run and host things on the Internet, without fossil fuels or extracting river water to cool data center racks. See LowTech magazine, the solar server network, many more examples.
Show threadAsharas

@sambutlerUS sure, I never use my computers at night anyway.

This is trying to fix a real problem with the wrong solution at the wrong level.

DC can be very eco efficient when designed that way coupled with low carbon energy providers (ideally nuke/solar/wind/hydro mix), just pick the right hosting provider.

Jun 28, 2024 at 3:02amWeb
Show threadSam ButlerJun 28, 2024

@asharas The @internetarchive data centers are depicted in the video to communicate this.

This video is more concerned with the industrial data centers being built right now — which are using immense amounts of land and nature (50 million square feet in US-EAST-1 area, set to double by 2028), threatening water supplies, and even re-activating fossil fuel plants for power in some cases. I think people are more familiar with these extractive data centers than designs like the Internet Archive — which gets to the point of the video: to show that different "𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢" exist!

In the meantime, I guess we have to deal with the ambiguity that "data center" can refer to an Internet Archive-like design or an extremely extractive design. It's good to keep in mind, that when we talk about "data centers", we can be talking about entirely different types of facilities.