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? 😉🤯

The project emerged from discussions in Fediverse. The conversations were about digitization, environmental sustainability of social networks, data centers and energy consumption. It started in 03/2019 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 http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon (dead link) and the GreenWebFoundation. You can find the code in the repository of the project. In 2021 and thanks to @aligyie, a new subjective Green Webhost Ranking was created. In May, the project updated the list of green instances and the information collected by the community about various web hosts.

Why are we doing this?

We, as users of the federated universe called "fediverse", a decentralized social network, are aware that our self-hosted instances run on servers with different types of energy consumption. The worldwide need for energy, especially for our datacenters will increase and the question is: What kind of energy will we use in the future? Which datacenters and services should we prefer? Green webhosting will be one of the important key factors facing the climate crisis on our planet. We are also facing the problem of non-transparency and the complexity of the energy market. Are there bad players on the market? How can we find out which energy suppliers offer us real green energy without greenwashing? With our lists we get a first but not complete overview about webhosting provider and Fediverse instances which are using renewable energy for their servers. We want to take a deeper look inside and on our digital infrastructure. With this first step we try to combine ecology, sustainability and technical aspects and make them more visible for everyone - our main goal is to create awareness for a sustainable development of the Fediverse and for this whole ongoing topic. We are also aware that it is not possible to use green energy everywhere on our planet. We are aware that the production of the hardware the server uses takes place under different conditions and that the exploitation of human and nature does not stop here. Therefore, this does not only open up questions that are limited to ecology, sustainability and technology, but also social and human rights aspects that are unfortunately always disregarded. Naming this conditions and inequalities is just a first step.

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" on 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. (This can then also be, for example, an instance / a server in the Fediverse) 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 as a status result with "green" or "gray". More information about the functionality of this API can be found here. We can still use the open GreenWebFoundation API and their dataset to let the databases collide with each other. "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, (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 "software" (Mastodon, Peertube, etc.) is used on an instance.

The magic: 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 a list. The result of this collision 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 concerns quite concretely the knowledge about the energy use of server operators and enterprises. 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 gathered by the community will be collected for each server operator and added to the list. For this purpose nieebel already collected a lot of information and put it together in a ranking. This information about the use of renewable energy is also collected here: 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 "whitelist", will then be added to the Green Instances List under "background information" and will be viewable. Servers marked as "rejected" are those that, based on our research, are contrary to the GreenWebFoundation's view/status. Since a rating "devaluation" comes into play here, the scope of the collected information is decisive. 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 generated energy.

You can use and implement the script of our list as you like - feel free to experiment with it.

GreenFediverse is and will be a non-commercial and open project!

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