I agree that it can be difficult for people to hear that a place they enjoy has issues with anti-Blackness. It can feel like a personal attack, and most people consider themselves ‘not-racist’.

I think the real thing to strive for is to be ‘anti-racist’, rather than ‘not-racist’. We all ultimately have prejudices - the point is are we able to simultaneously be honest with ourselves, forgive ourselves, and improve.

In many ways, the overall reaction to this piece actually proves many of its points. The overall reaction seems to have been to deny that the problem exists and refuse to investigate further (or, as you point out, to recognize that the Fediverse being discussed extends beyond Lemmy).

Additionally, some of the reactions here are themselves examples of anti-Blackness (e.g. accusations of so-called “reverse racism” and the like, as well as the ‘knee-jerk’ downvotes you describe). Which makes me less inclined to think of Lemmy as any kind of bastion of anti-racism!

Is there a reason you seem to be upset by this piece? This is a forum for discussion about the Fediverse. Seems entirely appropriate to me.

This may be true of your own experience on Lemmy, but on microblogging software such as Mastodon it is most definitely not the case.

Low bandwidth mode - what a great idea, thanks for pointing it out!

Thanks! Yeah tbh the gemlog is really just a mirror of the blog, but for the record it’s gemini://gemini.patatas.ca

I hear you on this - Akkoma does this by default, but the issue there is, let’s say someone on a tiny server posts an image, even a relatively small one - if it gets boosted by an account with 10k followers, that small server will effectively get DDOSed, assuming enough of those clients are online.

That’s a good question. The best answer is, I don’t know!

But if I had to guess, based on the small amount I’ve learned:

larger servers most likely benefit from economies of scale. They’ll be using CDNs, and will often have several people on their server following any given remote account, rather than just one. So the per-client energy use is almost certainly lower than for small servers.

But it’s still tough to know whether it’s the client or server using more energy. IIRC with video streaming, the end user’s device was a big factor in overall consumption - but it’s not like the server is chugging away 24/7 fetching media for you like a Fediverse server is.

For single-user servers, or servers with only a few accounts, I expect the server (and all the network infrastructure in between two servers) is doing a lot more work than the client(s) - unless it’s like, the server is on a raspberry Pi and the client is running on a powerful desktop for a lot of the day, or something. Again, many factors at play.

Really though, the question I start to ask in all this is more about, which parts of the system are the most difficult to justify?___

Nice. Yeah Gemini is pretty cool, and that actually reminds me, I have to publish this piece on my gemlog as well ;)

Haven’t tried tootik either but thanks for pointing me to it, will check it out!