GreenFediverse
What is the GreenFediverse?
GreenFediverse is an open project to empower the Fediverse to run on servers with renewable energy and creating awareness for a sustainable development of it. GreenFediverse provides a critical list about servers and their renewable energy consumption status in a Green Instances List
A brief history
Why not being the first dezentralised social network that runs on renewable energy? Sounds utopian, but we do it anyway!
The project emerged from discussions in Fediverse in 2019. The conversations were about digitization, environmental sustainability of social networks, data centers and energy consumption. It all started in March 2019 with the mastodon-account GreenFediverse. In the beginning the community around the project created some manually edited lists: old instances list and a green webhoster list. In 2020 @attac_hl worked on the technical realization of a new green instances list and combined the databases from Mastostats and the GreenWebFoundation. In 2021 @aligyie, created a green webhost ranking.
Why are we doing this?
We, as users of the federated universe called "fediverse" are aware that our self-hosted instances run on servers with different types of energy consumption. The global energy demand for our data centers will continue to increase despite the fact that they will be more efficient. One of the core questions are: what kind of energy will we use in the future? Should we favor certain data centers and services? Green web hosting will be one of the important key factors in addressing the climate crisis and environmental degradation on our planet. We face huge challenges on our way there. On the one hand, there is a great lack of transparency, including increasing greenwashing tendencies. We also face the complexity of the energy market and its unpredictable dynamics. Are there again bad players on the market? How can we find out which energy suppliers offer us real green energy without greenwashing?
With our research we try to get a first but not complete overview about webhosting provider. This data set include Fediverse instances which are using renewable energy for their servers. We want to take a closer look at our digital infrastructure to make the ecological footprint we leave in the digital space more visible. With this step we try to combine ecology and technical aspects, to make them visible and more aware for everyone - our main goal is to create awareness for an ecologically sustainable development of our digital space including the Fediverse, to transport this topic to public. We are aware that it is not possible to obtain or produce green energy everywhere on our planet. We do not want to blame anyone for not using green energy. We are aware that the production of the hardware that our server uses takes place in conditions that involve the exploitation of humans and nature. Therefore, the questions are not only limited to ecology and technology, but must also be extended to the dimensions of social and human rights aspects. Unfortunately, these dimensions are always disregarded, which is why we would like to strongly advocate that this topic should be viewed from a multi-perspective lens. Naming poor conditions and inequalities is only a small step. Building open knowledge can lead to more conscious choices in our actions.
So, let's build a data base! Let's see how it works!
You can help programming and assembling the open databases and APIs, or help building the database. Building the database means critically researching and building open knowledge about the energy usage of server operators. in both cases you should always check the repository first to see what tasks are currently available and where we are in the process.
How it works
1. Collision of open databases: There are two open databases we work with
Database 1: The GreenWebFoundation's open database, the "Green Web API" (github) works in such a way that it outputs the "green" status of a website. This is done by the GreenWebFoundation first using various machine-verifiable methods to determine the domain names, IP addresses or the autonomous system number. In addition, the GreenWebFoundation has built an independent certificate database, where operators of websites or web hosts, which can not be automated-machine recorded, can register - take a look at the registration-process. There, a "proof" in the form of a certificate can then be provided, i.e. a badge can be acquired. These registered servers and services can then be labeled, i.e. provided with the information that they operate with renewable energy or not. Website addresses can be queried in the front end via a "Green Web Check" search mask or via the API. Whether a "green" entry exists here, the API then outputs a status result with "green" or "gray". More information about the functionality of this API can be found here. "The Green Web Foundation is a recognized not-for-profit organization registered in the Netherlands, that is run by a small group of dedicated volunteers located in Germany and The Netherlands." "Our strategy is simple: we use the existing protocols of the internet to understand where infrastructure is run, when we speak to the people running it to see how they power it. We then make these answers easy to look up, providing free online tools, APIs and open datasets, and helping people incorporate this information into their own services and analysis."[citation]
Database 2: Another database we use is that of the-federation, (they are also on socialhome and github). Using the API, which is also open, we get a list of all connected and here registered instances of the Fediverse. A single instance offer us more information with the "/nodeinfo/2.0", (e.g. https://chaos.social/nodeinfo/2.0). Here we get, for example, what kind of "software" (Mastodon, Peertube, etc.) is used on an instance.
Then the magic begins: The Data-Collider:
Then we let these two databases collide with each other. The script we wrote, which you can find on framagit and codeberg then executes the command to green check all instances and provide the information we want to get in our list. The result is our Green Instances List.
2. Research: building a open knowledge database
While building up our own database we would like to get more knowledge by critical research and make it available to everyone. This relates very specifically to knowledge about the energy use of server operators. Through our script we already receive a first status of all registered Fediverse instances from the GreenWebFoundation. However, since we had to realize that not all companies and server operators are transparent with a statement about the use of renewable energy and partly even do greenwashing, we would like to complement this status with a qualitative and transparent research. This information collected by the community is for each server operator, technically all domain names, AS numbers or IP addresses are collected and added to the list. For this purpose nieebel already collected a lot of information and put it together in a selfmade ranking. This information about the use of renewable energy is also collected for our list in separate .md - files. In these text files the collective research is written in text, offer links to information pages and certificate files. Categorized as "additional infos", "rejectlist" or as a manually set "whitelist", will then be added to the Green Instances List under "background information". Servers marked as "rejected" are those that, based on our research, are contrary to the GreenWebFoundation's status. Since a downgrade rating comes into play here, the quality and validity of the collected information is critical to rejecting a status. Because server operators who claim to use renewable energies, but at the same time and by other means invest in fossil energies, cannot in our view make an ecologically sustainable contribution and are destroying their acquired status themselves - we do this in order to bring more reality, transparency and quality into play. More simply: unfortunately, we have to remain suspicious. Finally, we refrain from an exact and hardly realizable rating, because a lot of factors have to be considered and cannot be read out technically yet.
Maybe our collected information can thus lead to a more conscious decision when choosing a server - in the hope that in the future no one will use servers that are powered by harmful energy.
You can use and implement the script as you like - feel free to experiment with it. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
GreenFediverse is and will be a non-commercial and open project!
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