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I guess I only use the cloud for my email. No social media either. The climate aspect of these data centers frightens me that I took all my stuff off the cloud

I guess I only use the cloud for my email. No social media either. The climate aspect of these data centers frightens me that I took all my stuff off the cloud and store it locally. Even my email I store locally with thunderbird.

kevindamm 2y ago
re: the climate aspect, it's actually better to have some services like email operating in a data center. Think about all the idle no-op cycles your home email server is burning through. A million individual email servers will consume orders of magnitude more electricity than those same million+ accounts hosted in a data center. Efficiencies of scale.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
RE climate argument, your marginal impact on the environment is likely going to be worse with storing stuff locally vs. in the cloud. Even including the extra security/maintenance work that you don't need locally, the data center is still going to have more efficient hardware that's managed better, and gets all kinds of economies of scale, including efficiency (cooling) and utilization (via virtualization, if you're just using a service or VM and not colocating). I say that as someone who prefers local-first and avoid cloud dependencies like a plague.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  My photos are on my internal SSD drive. I don’t know how who having them on a cloud server is better ecologically. I don’t access my old photos really, sort of like a photo album under the coffee table. Taking less or no photos is kind of my thing now anyway.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    So you're decreasing your ecological impact by simply not doing what other people do. In other words it's not that you're local vs cloud. You're using local-S3-glacier and other people are using cloud-S3 + cloud-EC2.
    - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      > So you're decreasing your ecological impact by simply not doing what other people do. Yes. How else am I supposed to do it?
      - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
        I think that's a great way to do it! It's just not a cloud vs local argument, more of a more vs less argument

kevindamm 2y ago

re: the climate aspect, it's actually better to have some services like email operating in a data center. Think about all the idle no-op cycles your home email server is burning through. A million individual email servers will consume orders of magnitude more electricity than those same million+ accounts hosted in a data center. Efficiencies of scale.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

RE climate argument, your marginal impact on the environment is likely going to be worse with storing stuff locally vs. in the cloud. Even including the extra security/maintenance work that you don't need locally, the data center is still going to have more efficient hardware that's managed better, and gets all kinds of economies of scale, including efficiency (cooling) and utilization (via virtualization, if you're just using a service or VM and not colocating). I say that as someone who prefers local-first and avoid cloud dependencies like a plague.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago
My photos are on my internal SSD drive. I don’t know how who having them on a cloud server is better ecologically. I don’t access my old photos really, sort of like a photo album under the coffee table. Taking less or no photos is kind of my thing now anyway.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  So you're decreasing your ecological impact by simply not doing what other people do. In other words it's not that you're local vs cloud. You're using local-S3-glacier and other people are using cloud-S3 + cloud-EC2.
  - FollowingTheDao 2y ago
    > So you're decreasing your ecological impact by simply not doing what other people do. Yes. How else am I supposed to do it?
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
      I think that's a great way to do it! It's just not a cloud vs local argument, more of a more vs less argument