Can I ask why? I'm interested from the perspective of the whole blog vs. digital garden discussion.

I can't speak to the digital garden, as I only just heard the term last night while talking to somebody who has one.

The reason I'm moving to a blog format is that I have a forum, and I've been a forum sysop off and on since around 2008. I mostly talk to myself on my forum, so it may as well be a blog. That's what I treat it as. I just hop on and start shitposting whenever the mood strikes.

In that light, the change makes sense.

And your site is very cool, btw. Though I do wonder what you mean by roleplaying online. Is it roleplaying as in relating in a way you wouldn't face to face..... or roleplaying as in you're a 65 y/o guy in Dubai with an oxygen tank pretending to be a female goth in the US?

One of life's mysteries, I suppose. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

On the digital gardens thing. It's just a modern, perhaps fashionable way of describing an old fashioned, non chronologically ordered site, where existing pages get added or updated as and when needed. That's my take, anyway.

Good luck with the changeover!

By role-playing, I mean like the pre-Zuckerberg Web where everybody had a handle and a fictional online persona, rather than being forced to give out their PI.

I may very well be an old guy with an oxygen tank and what-not, but one of the unspoken rules of the early Web was "don't ask, don't tell."

At least until you get to know the other person well enough to exchange PI, I mean.

I'll tell you how to spot an old guy online. They'll usually start hounding you for pics right out of the gate.

I've been wondering lately how the shift to streaming has affected energy usage when compared to older tech like terrestrial or satellite? Any ideas?

Maybe that's what my site is then, and I just didn't know it was called that. There are obviously other pages besides the blog.

Thanks for clarifying. Now I'm regretting uploading a pic of myself as an avatar here....

Here's an enormous explanation if you're interested.

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

Well, analog television used much higher voltages than modern flat screens. So we've saved some energy there.

Modern TV sets also have built-in computers, so it's hard to say whether there's a net energy savings there. I'd say the TV is more energy-efficient than a desktop because the CPU in it doesn't usually require a cooling fan or elaborate liquid cooling system. In many cases, a modest ARM processor doesn't even need a heat sink.

All of those servers and computers being used to stream and consume television programming are probably going to be using energy whether people are watching TV on them or not. Connecting your computer to a TV would result in using two computers to watch TV, which would increase energy usage. It's really hard to say how dramatic an impact streaming has in that regard.

"Television, Sherman. I can forgive anything but television." - Kim Cattrall in Bonfire of the Vanities

The main drain on the Internet as far as streaming media goes is bandwidth. TCP/IP wasn't designed for television. Most other uses of TCP/IP involve transferring relatively small amounts of data. Over-the-air broadcasting and cable deliver TV more cost-effectively.

My argument against using the Internet for television is that, being a one-way communications platform, it's pointless to deliver it over an interactive medium.

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

That very much describes what I do on my forum. I have threads about various topics, and I'll bump any of them whenever I have the urge to say more about that topic.

I learned that modus operandi from another forum sysop who has been in love with forums all her life. She was an admin on a famous conspiracy-related forum back in the day.

P.S. I think I rage quit a platform because of Markdown at some point. I'm a bbCode kind o' gal from way back.

They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations.

Another thing I do is cross-reference recurring themes by quoting and linking to my other posts across thread. I think of the forum as a sort of zettelkasten, although it's not exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

I suspect that the use of streaming multimedia on the internet has driven energy usage way up. We used to joke about underestimating the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, but imagine the bandwidth of a USPS van full of DVDs. Netflix should have stuck to mailing out physical media.

When the public at large started getting on the internet, streaming was an inevitability, someone was always bound to do it. I do miss the early days when no one cared about streaming rights, so Netflix had anything and everything you could think of, and a near infinite supply of things you never would have thought of.

Thanks for the answers guys. Rootling around, I see some guestimates put the internet as accounting for up to 20% of global electricity usage by 2025. That's a lot of solar panels.

All this in mind, I can't help but wonder if what we need isn't some kind of data frugalism, or perhaps digital conservatism?

Thanks again.

Oh, and, going forward, I'm now never going to be able to see DVDs as anything other than crystalized bandwidth. :)

It certainly wouldn't hurt. When I implement the mute and volume controls on my site, the mute control will actually be a pause control. There's no point in streaming the sound period if the user isn't hearing it.

At risk of sounding like a Republican, this isn't a technological problem. Our culture is fucked because it privileges audio and video over text. We live in a post-literate society, where people are encouraged to watch or listen rather than reading. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as a societal roadmap. If we could get off that track and encourage people to prefer text with occasional illustrations over audio or video a lot of problems would solve themselves.

My website isn't that big, for example. It's just HTML, CSS, and some images. I run the images through ImageMagick to resize them so that they're no bigger than 1024x768 and conver them to interlaced JPEG at 85% quality. I could probably make my images even smaller by using WebP, but fuck Google.

This ain't no shit: a single Tweet/X post takes about 2MB of data. Most of it JavaScript. And for what? A 280 character shitpost?

By way of comparison, the text of a 110,000 word novel I published a decade ago this November weighs in at less than 320KB). Takes less than 2 seconds to load on a decent connection. The Web doesn't have to be a shithole. Web developers make it one because we won't unionize and stand up to suits who demand user-hostile shit.

Seriously, though, sneakernet can be a lot more efficient than sending data over the wire.

https://burntelectrons.org/2021/08/never-underestimate-the-bandwidth-of-a-station-wagon-full-of-tapes-hurtling-down-the-highway/

Just like you can probably use basic UNIX tools instead of Hadoop to parallelize data processing.

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html

Do you strip out EXIF, IPTC, and other metadata? That could make them even smaller.

Bruh. My site is halfway to being a Twitter clone, and every page is less than 10kB of JSON.

I don't even look at packages with goofy soy-grin-having names like that. They're lucky I'm using Ubuntu instead of plain Debian.

(I bet Deb was pretty hot for Ian to name a whole distro after her.)

I do now that you reminded me. Just had to add "-strip" to the relevant ImageMagick calls in my site's makefile.

Well, you're probably not dicking around with React or Angular, and you probably aren't trying to implement every user-hostile design pattern known to man or demon.

Soy, schmoy. Hadoop sounds like something I'd do in the bathroom with the door locked and the exhaust fan overclocked.

I guess we should be grateful these techies aren't trying to start heavy metal bands. They'd probably come up with names that make it impossible to take them seriously once they run out of fantasy and sf novels to rip off.

I'm not touching that one without a hazmat suit.

No, sir. I can write my own code faster than I can decipher somebody else's.

There's a rant about that in my sticky thread.

I see where I went wrong a-quoting in the post above now.

On every board I've been on for the last 20 years, it's been "quote" tags. I keep forgetting it's "quoting" here.

I think most developers can. Unfortunately, the programmer I was six months ago is also "somebody else".

I know. I read it.

The difference between that somebody else and all of the other somebody elses is that you know how that somebody else thinks. So it's not as hard to figure out what the hell he was thinking.

Yeah, maybe there are two overlapping problems here. The replacement of a functional technology with a newer, less efficient one, sitting alongside an ever accelerating drift away from written sources of information, with both tied up in a self reinforcing doom spiral.

Good point. Nice and gloomy. Satisfying.

I'd also say the problem is only exacerbated by the fact that so much of what counts as culture these days is cooked up in toto by marketers and corporations. Of course, the ultimate, eventual effect of streaming on the financial viability of the media industry is yet to be determined.... so we'll see what happens on that front. Fingers crossed.

True enough. Though, for various reasons, I fear the glory days of unionism are firmly in the past. But who knows? We might get lucky. :) It's also possible (at some point) that economic realities could do the job for us.

As only a semi-tech person, I had not heard the "bandwidth of a station-wagon" quip before. It is a thing of beauty. Thank you.

EDIT: Hey, you're an author. Cool. I look forward to giving your book(s) a peruse.

@starbreaker mentions Fahrenheit 451, but the corporate Web contains elements of 1984 as well, namely Orwell's concept of the "memory hole." That's when information disappears without a trace. In Orwell's day, printed copies of information that the regime wanted to disappear had to be physically rounded up and destroyed. Now it can be done with the click of a button. News and information sites routinely scrub information that doesn't support their agendas. I recall one scathing opinion piece on a New York Times website blog in which the author called out certain practices in the news media that were undermining public confidence and trust in the media. The author accepted the blame and the onus to make amends on behalf of himself and his fellow journalists. When I went to look for it again some time later so I could cite it, it was nowhere to be found.

Here's a catch phrase for you: "industry plant." That's a term used to describe manufactured culture.

An industry plant is an individual or group persona manufactured by a commercial entity and promoted as an organic DIY or grassroots entity, usually to feign membership in a subculture or disaffected group, for fandom or monetary gain.

https://www.devastatia.com/thread-2.html