My solar-powered and self-hosted website

Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted on a CDN, due to the CDN operators keeping their machines near full utilization, and fewer network hops required for an average request.

Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware.

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.

> Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware.

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)

Agreed, that's a fair criticism. The whole mindset needs to shift to actually become sustainable, and the mindset shift is more likely to happen by self-hosting with used hardware than abstracting away hardware to a datacenter.

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.