this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Old news, but streaming is possibly worse for the environment than physical media was in its heyday. Can we help mitigate that? (www.rollingstone.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I don't know much about this stuff, first of all... maybe this is well trodden territory already and I just missed it. Sorry if that's the case! I'm a relatively new FunkWhale user, but it has completely replaced all other music streaming for me.

I'm wondering about the potential for decentralized, federated music streaming to mitigate the environmental issues we're seeing with mainstream streaming. Like...

  • Potentially we could all be streaming from locations much physically closer to us, if that matters.
  • FunkWhale hosts might be much more inclined to operate off of solar than the big businesses are.
  • We might all be using the latest (opus I guess?) in efficient file formats, i.e. low file size, easy to decode, etc.
  • I'm vaguely aware that huge data centers waste massive amounts of water, right? As someone who doesn't really understand this stuff, it seems to me like distributed streaming would require much less extreme methods of cooling/maintenance/etc.

Then again, supposedly there are efficiency advantages to being centralized in other contexts. That seems to be peoples first and foremost argument for centralization in most contexts. Do those apply here as well? Thank you for your time, and your patience with a noobie. 😅

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[–] aubertlone 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, reading through this article, I'm not sure exactly what to make of the researcher's conclusions. He directly compares tons of plastic used with conventional media with tons of CO2 generated by the overall cost of electricity compared to streaming.

These two things are not necessarily equivalent.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I definitely agree that those aren't really all that comparable, but more important than the comparison itself is that streaming isn't nearly as environmentally friendly as it kind of intuitively seems. I'm just trying to figure out how decentralized federated streaming fits into the overall picture, and what we as its users can to do help.

[–] magiccupcake 1 points 2 years ago

A decentralized alternative would likely do far worse.

Music isnt that hard to stream (compared to video), so a bunch of people using their home hardware to transfer data will be much less efficient than an industrial size datacenter.