I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint…

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:19:55 GMT

smallcircles@social.coop — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:19:55 GMT

Should become an intrinsic part of Social experience design (SX), which follows a holistic Circles of sustainability model..

How We Reimagine the Social Web

We find novel ways to collaborate and create value together.

Social coding commons (coding.social)

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:18:04 GMT

smallcircles@social.coop — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:18:04 GMT

@UlrikeHahn that is a very good point.

And I missed addressing that in my issue on the ActivityPub API earlier, which holds opportunity to do a fedi course correction..

Protocol design · Issue #66 · swicg/activitypub-api

(This issue is created in follow-up of #63 Avoid misconception and #4 Rate limiting, and related fedi thread.) Avoiding misconceptions: What is a profile? I think my overarching concern is that the ActivityPub API specification doesn't b...

GitHub (github.com)

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:06:55 GMT

laurenshof@indieweb.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:06:55 GMT

@UlrikeHahn the people from stream.place also got very excited about this recently: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nandakumar-atproto-atom-00.html

sorta directionally similar to peertube in the sense that they are both trying to solve for how to video CDN primitives into the social protocol layer

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:58:17 GMT

laurenshof@indieweb.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:58:17 GMT

@UlrikeHahn

another vibe guess is that the interesting thing here is probably neither activitypub nor atproto, but figuring out distributed CDNs, which is most likely agnostic to either atproto or activitypub. peertube's work with p2p streaming is probably relevant here

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:53:39 GMT

laurenshof@indieweb.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:53:39 GMT

@UlrikeHahn (https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines)

this is just on the top of my head though, havent looked into it much beyond this

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:52:40 GMT

laurenshof@indieweb.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:52:40 GMT

@UlrikeHahn if thats true (no idea, this was just quick searching) than the main contributor to energy usage is actually not video CDNs, but devices that do autoscroll videos. so if youd want to optimise for lower carbon footprints youd want a protocol that either deprioritises the possibility to have autoscroll video, or has a flexible frontend/client layer that allows people to select clients that dont use autoscroll for video

Reply to I see virtually no discussion of the relationship between protocol design and carbon footprint… on Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:50:29 GMT

laurenshof@indieweb.social — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:50:29 GMT

@UlrikeHahn interesting question: my first instinct was to think about how can video CDNs be deduplicated while staying decentralised/resilient, as video is really the main factor here, text (whatever format) is just so much smaller in size

looked into it, then i saw this claim from the IEA: "Based on average viewing habits, my updated analysis shows that viewing devices account for the majority of energy use (72%), followed by data transmission (23%) and data centres (5%). "