Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I'd counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I've seen a lot of too).
The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use "crisis": https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/
68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That's a lot....right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn't compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that's something that's tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf
That's 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces "something useful", but usefulness doesn't factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.
yeah, I think the whole "water" argument really dilutes the case against data centers.
On a serious note, the argument works for areas that already struggle to supply enough water for consumers. Otherwise, we should be focusing more on the power stress to the grid, and the domino effect on supply chain of hardware cost increases that it's happening across many industries. It started with GPUs, now it's CPU, storage, networking equipment, and other components.
If these prices are too high for a couple of years, we'll start seeing generalized price increases as companies need to pass along the costs to consumers.
I think the supply chain issue is probably the most pressing out of all of them. The other points people have are either non-issues or a result of dropping usage hogs into existing electrical infrastructure. Infrastructure can be updated, though.
Supply chain is different. There isn't a supply shortage of chips, its that profitability dictates you should sell them to datacenters or adjacent industry. Unlike infrastructure where you can just build out more, adding more supply for chips just means you have more to sell to datacenters. Since the demand is there, end of day profits will always win.