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.
I appreciate the practical suggestions section, there’s some great ideas there.
You might be interested in the low bandwidth mode that https://piefed.social has. It can be enabled during login and removes most of the images and Javascript.
Really, developers need new tools to support these values. Our dev tools report on performance and reliability but not on sustainability / energy use / CO2. Our programming frameworks offer flexibility, power and expand-ability but never intentionally constrain our energy / waste / performance. The only exception to this that I’ve seen is Google App Engine which has some resource utilization limits and a pretty limited ORM that feels like fighting with one hand tied behind my back sometimes.
Low bandwidth mode - what a great idea, thanks for pointing it out!