this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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I don't see how billions of users connected on the same pipe can be more efficient than being connected each to a different point of a network.
I think YouTube is mostly a network of datacenter of his own right now, but that doesn't change anything since we can not see it.
On the energy usage, maybe, but this usage will be better spread across the earth than being concentrated on a few points.
The Internet is not a "series of tubes" ... It's a packet-switched messaging network. The fact that billions of computers are "connected" to a single address doesn't really mean much other than they've exchanged some messages within the last several minutes (or some other arbitrary amount of time).
You're not wrong: any sizeable web service must distribute to several servers and data centers for performance (e.g. response times and data throughput), and for resiliency (e.g. if a server fails then another one can take over). But the difference is these data centers have a financial incentive to maximize efficiency in both hardware costs and electricity usage (which includes cooling, etc.). Folks self-hosting Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. servers in their basement have much less incentive, and so less effort is put into eeking out every ounce of capability per dollar. Even hosting on AWS/Google/Azure/etc is never going to beat a bespoke data center dedicated to one particular application.
Although they don't necessarily publish this information, at least a data center can accurately measure its energy usage (which tends to dwarf hardware costs...). Also newer hardware will always outperform old hardware per energy usage. For either aspect I can't say the same for the server in my basement ... It's 10 year-old hardware running on the same circuit as the beer fridge next to it. I have no idea how much electricity it uses to handle like 2 users. It's a glorified space heater.
It's all about trade-offs. Fediverse applications value open standardization, availability, and long-term resiliency over efficiency, performance, and short-term profits.
The Fediverse is great, but in the short/mid-term, efficiency and ecological impact aren't things i would expect it to excel at.
There are tubes nonetheless, under the Atlantic ocean for instance.... But I agree.
The major economic impact of the digital is making new teminal. The second is the streaming. I can find the scientific research about that if you like.
With this in mind, you are telling me that a streaming software running with potential low tech hardware and using p2p (allowing for packet to NOT travel 3 times around the world before reaching destination) will not be better for the environment than a centralised video system running 4k formats and advertising everywhere?
Again, maybe I'm missing something here. And yes hardware running uses power, yes datacenter are more power efficient (I already talked about that in the thread).
If you've got some scientific papers handy, I'd love to see them!
The point I'm trying to make is that YouTube has an incentive to design their system to not let traffic travel further than it has to (users closer to a data center hosting the content they want will get it faster). They build data centers close to where their users live. Even then, delivery is likely less energy-intensive than video transcoding, meaning large, specialized data centers make a lot of sense for that task. They then distribute transcoded content to smaller, regional servers to improve user experience ... again, specialized systems for a specialized task.
This means that YouTube has already distributed their system across many different servers in many different regions around the world, so in many ways, they already take advantage of the efficiency benefits of p2p, but they can carefully coordinate to reduce overall costs in a way that p2p can't (yet).
But the Fediverse will lag in efficiency for exactly the reason you pointed out: it's running on low tech, general-purpose hardware. Energy usage has the largest environmental impact by far. Hardware that is specialized (like Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) or newer will always outperform general or old hardware.
Here is the study : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/4238589?sommaire=4238635 It's in French, I didn't find something in English (maybe in the IPCC studies ). 47% of digital impact comes from users terminals (mostly from smartphone manufacturing).
I agree with you, but YouTube is also a big part of the incentive of building more and more new hardware. Plus as I said before YouTube isn't just for hosting videos but also metrics tools, content id, advertising, editing tools and such... All this needs also power to run.
Did you have any data regarding packet distribution on google services? Last time I checked (about 4/5 years ago) an email send from a gmail to a gmail traveled about 1,5 of the earth size. Which is a lot for 2 laptops side by side in the same room.
Lastly you're trying to make this a debate only on the tech aspect but it is not. They are ethical points at stake and they are equally important I think.
Interesting article (my French is not good, but with the help of translation I get the idea). Thank you for sharing.
Ahh so, I think there is room for confusion. Fediverse is "p2p" only in the context of the (federated) servers. PeerTube/Lemmy/Mastodon/etc. are still "centralized" in that your instance (e.g. programming.dev) is shared with many other users (possibly worldwide). This potentially increases the cost of delivery, because a user still has to find a server, and may select one that is ideologically, rather than physically, close to them. Because YouTube's servers are ideologically homogeneous, there is no reason to find a server other than the one physically closest to you, and thus the cheapest to stream from. So delivery costs to the end user's terminal should be even higher for PeerTube as compared to YouTube!
A completely flat, p2p architecture potentially eliminates almost all of the cost of delivery, but it does introduce other costs, and doesn't eliminate the need for video encoding. I don't have any research available, but I feel confident it will not be simple to compare with centralized services like Fediverse or traditional web services. I will keep my eye out for research.
There are many reasons to switch to Fediverse. I'm simply arguing that "efficiency" is not one of them :)
Unless everyone have an instance near home :) which is the case for me on Peertube, didn't checked for Lemmy though. I should check when I can. But for this to happen we need instances. Small, large, run by people, associations, communities, whatever.
Yes encoding is still a thing, but less analysis, online editing bullshit and advertising. So yeah Peeture is lighter than YouTube ;)
I agree that strict efficiency could be hard to tell on video diffusion only.