What are your thoughts on website eco certification?
What are your thoughts on website eco certification?
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6839374
Fad or relevant?
The idea of holding individuals and small organizations responsible for their carbon use is a deliberate eco-fakery invented by the fossil fuel industry. It does nothing, except in cases where it leads to purchasing "carbon offsets," in which case it does nothing and also makes some scammer somewhere some money.
Most big changes that need to happen are on the industrial level (switching to different sources of electrical power or changing pollution regulations). They may have some impact on the end-user consumer, but mostly not. Mostly what it would mean is that some obscenely rich person still gets to be obscenely rich but not as much as they want to be.
(AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions where the power consumption is actually pretty significant and you can make a case that the individual involved in it bears some responsible for the impact. But again, the strategy should be for the individual to advocate for changing regulations, not for the individual to look inward towards themselves but turn a blind eye to everyone else who decides to murder the planet, if they want to because there's some money in it for them.)
AI and cryptocurrency are rare arguable-exceptions
Crypto yes, AI does not come even close to 1% of that.
Hm, I was a little bit wrong about it -- you're right, AI is basically nothing right now. Here's a report with more.
- All data centers put together use about 2% of global electricity demand
- Cryptocurrency is almost a quarter of that
- AI is basically none of that right now, but likely to rise to be competitive with cryptocurrency in the pretty near future as it gets wider and wider adoption.
From the POV of doing literally anything for the environment, yeah it's just trash. If we're going to bash websites for being overly complicated and costing their organizations millions a month on EC2 Bezos Bucks, making the web unusable for people with screen readers, password managers, RSS feeds, web archives etc then yeah, be my guest. Destroy it all.
That's a good point, usually accessibilty code and other components will make the website heavier, I suppose
Yeah generally simper web pages are much better for people with accessibility issues. When everyone adds tons of weird JavaScript garbage on top then it's very hard to make tools that work reliably on the pages
Pretty meaningless since it doesn't capture server side footprint which can easily be much larger
How would they even know how carbon intensive slrpnk.net is? All they can do is measure some page loading speed and maybe do some very general assumptions about how much energy the lemmy-ui needs to be rendered in a browser.
While lightweight websites in terms of browser usage are nice for battery use on mobile devices, it says very little about the overall energy use of a website, or where that energy is sourced from (which makes a big difference for the carbon foot-print).
i dont think it particularly effective for environment, but if helps make web lighter and more accessible thats a good things meowz
To counter all the negative comments, I think the idea of making websites low energy (think solar.lowtech as an extreme example) is a good design principle. Yeah, in the big scheme of things it means not much but something is better than nothing.
https://www.websitecarbon.com/
This has been discussed before a while back. When it came up, I measured my page that is an environmental site and blog and it got an A+ rating. My intent in choosing the theme was to make it low data as possible (with my technological illiteracy) and I think the rating reflects that. No one wants or needs heavy webpages for a majority of them, of course exceptions apply. In this day and age, the heavier they are, the more data they are actively stealing.
Inconvenient truth: the location of your website matters more than its content in terms of footprint. Hosting in on a VPS at Amazon probably has a lower footprint than a raspberry pi in your garage. And overall, it is really, really small.
I'm not saying it isn't but like said, something is better than nothing. The doomerism involved in saying the individual can't make any choices doesn't make me feel solarpunk.
Everyone should be aware of the bleeding obvious but if individuals want to make changes, then let them? I like to plant thousands of trees each year and I definitely know that isn't going to save the planet but I still do it because it makes me feel good.
10000% this, make the web lighter an smaller and use less energy mrowr !!
The machine it is hosted on can have more than a 10x impact on its electricity use.
I'd say just a fad, but even if it doesn't have a significant change environmentally, it can still have other positive effects I suppose
Sounds like some sort of carbon credit style LARP.
Because of the data efficiency thing. I think even when the saved CO2 is very minimal I think it is still better for people where the infrastructure is not as good or for people who can't access the free net. The Tor network for example is run by volunteers and is not nearly so fast nor has the same capacity than the clear net. So keeping the traffic interactions but decreasing the data needed by the websites could benefit the Network.