Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware.
This is a hobby and aesthetic thing, which is valid and interesting.
If anyone has some good data about carbon emissions of self-hosted vs shared hardware I’d love to see it.
Most of the environmental impact happens at the building of hardware, so putting even more websites in datacenter only increases environmental impact. All Capitalism has done here is completely forget that impact by telling you it's ok to do always more.
What we collectively need to do is not find a better tech, it's reduce the total amount of tech we use, and that starts with questioning our actual uses. We don't need 24/7 available websites, 90% availability is more than enough. In fact, more sites should only target 90% availability, and if we were serious about tackling this we'd look towards 1. using old computers to the death because they still can and 2. doing more offline-first. Putting your website in a datacenter is exactly what the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) warns about. Its environmental impact keeps exploding year after year and it's not with that mindset that we'll make a dent in it.
(Remember, the environment is not a resource, so Capitalism doesn't care about it)
I think a more likely way of changing usage patterns is by actually pricing carbon cost into energy production and manufacturing via taxes. The costs of things are only so low because we are borrowing from the future. I don't think a mindset shift will happen under capitalism without the monetary cost of things increasing. And I don't think capitalism will change unless by collapsing, at which point we're too late anyway, and would come with much human suffering. I don't believe that capitalism is fundamentally broken, but I do believe that unchecked capitalism is. Regulation and taxes are required to manage its negative tendencies.
If we want to take it into consideration, we have to take the matter in our own hands, away from the State, away from capitalistic interests.