Digital Limits Watch #5
Hello everyone! This month we're looking at the topic of storage and hosting. Enjoy!
Storage, hosting and social network
You couldn't miss it, in the fall, Elon Musk bought Twitter, leading to a migration to several alternatives including Mastodon. This influx of new users led to an increased visibility of the work required to maintain the servers (called instances) of the distributed social network. Technical work, but also community work. The need to make this work visible, and the issues related to storage, among others, came to the fore.
Unlike Twitter - which hides the cost of maintaining its infrastructure and the mass capture of data needed to run it targeted ads business model - for Mastodon instances data storage can be an issue as it largely determines the costs of hosting.
For the mastodon.design instance on which we are present (Nolwenn & Thomas), this translates concretely in the need to move to a higher storage offer from $19 to $39 per month. Technical solutions or workarounds exist to scale better. But this only postpones the problem.
Making the storage costs visible led us to discuss issues of cleaning and maintaining our digital spaces: on an individual level Mastodon offers interesting options such as scheduling the automatic deletion of posts based on some parameters (age threshold, exceptions for the most re-shared posts etc).
On a collective scale, however, this is still not well thought out. To raise awareness of these issues Timothée Goguely, mastodon.design administrator, regularly reports on the use of disk space dedicated to the instance. On the homepage, he also offers advice on how to compress or avoid hosting media that are too heavy.
This responsibility brought to the individual level requires us to relearn how to pay attention to our content, whereas platforms have accustomed us to the contrary. But how can we go beyond the individual level to think about these issues? What would a social network that embeds these issues in its design look like (we think for example of the art project Minus.social where you only have 100 posts in your whole life)? Today, the Mastodon dashboard for administrators unfortunately remains focused on growth metrics.
And beyond that, does communal hosting means sobriety or not? On the occasion of their migration to Mastodon, researchers in Science and Technology Studies discussed the establishment of alternative forms of hosting to large datacenters (the othernets), local, intermittent hosting that does not scale, and other avenues to explore.
Other news, on storage and hosting:
If we don't come across them in our daily life, magnetic tape cassettes have never disappeared (fr), they are useful to store huge amounts of data (18 terabytes per cassette).
The development of the Cloud was not a given, it was even fought by many CIOs who saw it as a loss of autonomy for their organizations. Dwayne Monroe takes a look back at how the cloud got started. A quick reminder that the reception of technologies often varies according to context (historical, cultural, etc.) and that their development is rarely linear and often contingent.
In Calafou's feminist and self-managed server separates "living data" that must be accessible online at all times, from "transitional data", which is only needed for a time (like a questionnaire for a file upload), and "dead data", closer to the archive. "Doing this forces you to ask yourself what data you really need to have online and for how long. (fr)"
In this twitter thread, Carlos Neollosa comes back to the problems encountered with self-hosted mail servers today, the most emblematic example of decentralized and backward compatible techno. His thread shows that it doesn't only depend on itself but also on a more global socio-technical environment, here related to the computational/energy cost of processing spam.
Limites numériques project news
Living with an obsolete smartphone
You can read Léa Mosesso's dissertation following the survey work carried out over the last few months: Living with an obsolete smartphone - Smartphone obsolescence, diagnosis and extension strategies (fr). A synthetic version will be published in the coming months, and an academic article is also in preparation.
The ecological Alter-design of digital
We are launching the Ecological alter-design of the Digital: an exploratory work to analyze, critique and rethink the ways in which the digital presents itself to us. We want to highlight and analyze the choices in terms of forms, words, metaphors and images that condition what we do with the digital and what we understand about it.
To think about the forms of a more ecological digital, we must question these choices and propose alternatives, whether they are new or have been left aside historically.
Our first work is based on the representations of storage. The ways of representing its memory or its organization.
In the analysis part, we present some findings and their effects such as :
The weight of the contents is hardly represented and there is only talk of storage in the interfaces when there is none left.
The gradual disappearance of the desktop metaphor, with its organization into folders and files, contributes to the invisibilization of storage. On smartphones in particular, the dissociation between what happens on the screen and technically hinders maintenance and housekeeping practices.
The platforms operate a deceptive invisibilization of the weight when it is not included in the commercial offer.
We conclude with some hints on alternatives to represent the storage and its orders of magnitude in a more sensitive way or to work on the practices of self-deletion. Your feedback and ideas are welcome!
Obsolescence
Lately the availability of updates seems to become a selling point for smartphone vendors:
Samsung is partnering with iFixit to make it easier to repair their phones, and this could extend to their wireless watches and headphones. This comes alongside a trademark application for a "self repair assistant."
iFixit launches the World Repair Championship, you can enter the contest.
Good news, we keep our smartphones longer. In France, it's 36 months compared to 24 months 5 years ago (which is the length of a mobile package commitment). There are several reasons for this: inflation of course, an increase in purchase budget (+7%) but also an increase in the duration of use.
Apple increases the price of batteries on March 1st and complicates their replacement (via software blocking) to push consumers to buy into their warranty program.
Without Limits
The Worst of CES by iFixit: like this battery-powered TV that you hang on the wall or these (already not very eco-friendly) wireless headphones with screen.
Apple in court for not having warned that updates on some iPhones slowed down performance considerably.
Complaint from the association HOP against Apple again for programmed obsolescence and impeding repair.
An article about energy-intensive feature choices that YouTube has made in terms of interface and that are activated by default. For example, the dark mode is accompanied by a function that consumes a lot of computing power: the "cinema lighting" that projects in real time a fade of the colors on the edges but whose effect is mainly behind the video...; or the automatic reading of the thumbnails when the mouse passes over them, often accidentally, and where everything is re-downloaded each time. We also learn that the platform broadcasts audio and video streams separately. This would technically allow not to download the video when users listen to music on the platform but it reserves the right to do so only on its Premium version.
To connect the last 5% we will pollute the sky.
Anecdotes
(Don't hesitate to send us yours!)
In this newsletter the author describes an example of a "longcut" to refer to the path - not necessarily efficient (nor the lightest) but the most natural - that a middle school girl takes to make a note on her phone:
"after opening Snapchat, she took a picture with her finger on the camera to get a black background, she then took her notes on the picture, like writing text on an Instagram story, and then took a screenshot of the whole thing."
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