this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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What I dislike is the lumping of all datacenters into one hated bucket. I suspect people don't realize that, for example, the fediverse........... exists in datacenters. Take away datacenters and the entire internet goes away.
I think what people don't want is a bunch of shitty datacenters (meaning using shitty power sources, for example) that are being built for AI or massive government/private data over-reach.
You WANT some datacenters...............
This is like being against............ prepared food. Sure, cooking from scratch is better, but outlaw all prepared foods and now you will be exhausted cooking every single day. We depend on some prepared foods. What we want is less added sugar, more healthy prepared foods, safer food, at a lower cost. We want improvements, not a complete ban.
Same with datacenters.
There is also the difference that the fediverse runs on a few potato servers. You could barely fill a few racks with the servers that do the fediverse
This in contrast with AI that requires tonnes of datacenters all over the world
I think the main reason is that people didn't notice the old data centers. There is a data centre in my town about a two minute walk from where I live, I lived here for 3 years before noticing it. It's just a non-descript massive gray building and somehow it's kind of invisible. I could probably ask people who've lived here their entire lives if they knew about the data centre, and I suspect that most of them would swear up and down that there isn't one. It doesn't make noise, it doesn't generate huge amounts of traffic, it doesn't use that much water up if any, and it has its own electrical supply. I essentially live right on top of it, yet it has basically no effect on my life. According to Google Street view it was built some time between 2015 and 2017, so it's not an AI data centre.
These new AI ones require orders of magnitude more power, and cooling. They have a much larger impact on the local environment.
That poor rural communities should subsidize data centers’ water and electrical consumption so that random websites can be cheaper to maintain is a weird argument but okay.
Data centers are currently unregulated, inefficient, ecologically destructive resource pits parasitical on poor communities. That’s the problem. A simple solution would be to sell them water and electricity at 1000x the cost per gallon of a regular household. If that doesn’t encourage innovation, just require data centers to purify wastewater and generate their own clean energy! Problem solved.
There is unfortunately a lot of propaganda on this subject, and it's quite aggravating how much of the public has just bought into these ideas. A data center is no less "ecologically destructive" than any other large building project, like a meat processing plant or chemical plant, except they don't even have to worry about food safety or chemical pollution. The only novel things about a data center are:
Does that need some level of mitigation? Of course. But, the current attitude makes people believe that they are on the level of some nuclear waste processing facility.
These are jobs for other facilities. A data center, just like 99.999% of the other buildings, are just going to buy whatever electricity is already on the grid.
If you want clean energy, promote more alternatives on the grid. Electricity is only as clean as whatever your local power plant provides.
…which cause ecological devastation at an unimaginable scale and give poor communities cancer. This comparison is apt.
Not anymore. Townships cannot be made responsible for the pet projects of billionaires, nor is it their job to subsidize the internet. Get your own water and clean energy or fuck off.
I want to emphasize that this is a massive compromise since my first choice is [redacted].
The U.S. has over 3000 datacenters, which is 10x 2nd place (Germany). Most are very small nondescript buildings near the airport.
With how fast big tech moves to break things there‘s no time for nuance. I‘m not being sarcastic or anything. I‘m serious. We genuinely don‘t need all that computing power. It makes live only harder instead of improving it at this point because it‘s mostly used to replace us in the job market and spy on us in our free time. So yeah, fight every single data center. Fuck nuance.
This attitude is fucking toxic. How do you think we got here? Black & white absolutism. Dumbass right-wing assholes who listen to propaganda garbage and think a 2-minute uncritical explanation of a subject is gospel, because fuck nuance, right?
These are the same dipshits who hate transpeople because "it wasn't around 30 years ago, so it must be wrong", and "it didn't happen to me, so these people are just crazy", and other fucked-up explanations. Because fuck nuance, right?
Don't stoop to that level. We're smart than that.