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.

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.

Yep, it's like asking toddlers their opinion on biomolecular chemistry. Just totally meaningless.

Do you understand the point of polls? They give hard data points so instead of people saying "I hear X" and making guesses, this is actual data on what people feel and think.

I think what you mean is that these results don't surprise you. That's fine. It's still valuable data. Maybe just not to you.

Politicians do things. They allow them because they work for the corporations.

We do using the 4 boxes of liberty.

Soap box: Freedom of speech. It has already been successful to stop many data centers from being constructed. Make your voice heard at town meetings and social media. If that doesn‘t work because they suppress communication we move on to the next box.

Ballot box: Vote for change. Politicians don‘t listen? Vote other representatives who do. If that didn‘t work because all candidates are corrupt pigs we try the next box.

Jury box: Sue them. There has been success on this level too. Many data centers don‘t even wait for the permit. There‘s a lot of wrenches that you can throw between their gears on a legal level. Besides, a jury can even decide in favor of the town folks on no legal basis at all. Just because they think it makes more sense to stop the data center. But sometimes even that doesn‘t work because corporations already lobbied to bend the laws in advance. Which leaves us with the last option.

Cartridge box: Armed resistance is the last line of defense. This is true for fighting the techno fascist state as it is to fight any enemy of democracy and freedom. It has seen some success to push back against Flock, for example.

So yeah, I would argue a lot is being done already.