
Sustainable Web Manifesto - matthewdumler
https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com
======
kerkeslager
Posting this on Hacker News seems kind of ironic to me. I can count on one
hand the number of startups that even put a serious effort to live up to this,
and I wonder if any exist that succeed.

If you required "open" and "honest" as defined by the manifesto, almost the
entire marketing industry and the industries it supports would have to shut
down. Even supposedly-altruistic nonprofits are tricking people into
subscribing to their mailing lists and then stockpiling the emails in opaque
databases these days.

~~~
davidivadavid
I think Hacker News might need to take a chill pill and stop calling complete
industries dishonest with so little to back it up.

Most of the marketing industry is just as honest as most of the tech industry.

In fact, it's far easier to argue that many products labeled as "tech" are far
more manipulative than your average marketing agency.

~~~
kerkeslager
> Most of the marketing industry is just as honest as most of the tech
> industry.

Yes. Both are generally pretty dishonest. Pointing to another industry's guilt
doesn't make the first industry innocent.

Are you disagreeing with my example? How many companies actually DON'T try to
trick people into giving them their mailing address, and then stockpile the
emails?

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frenchman99
The company behind this seems to be genuinely interested in a greener web:
[https://www.wholegraindigital.com/](https://www.wholegraindigital.com/)

Unfortunately, I feel like lots of things can be understood in a variety of
ways. Take this:

> The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and
> material resources possible.

What does that mean ? Should I use C to create websites, so that each web
request takes less energy ? What about the energy I use to code : is that
accounted for ?

And this:

> The products and services we provide will support an economy that nourishes
> people and planet.

What kind of products and services does that exclude ?

~~~
majewsky
> The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and
> material resources possible.

The wording is unfortunate, but I understand this to mean that tools (e.g.
programming languages) should be chosen with resource usage in mind. The last
word, "possible", gives you an out to reasonably argue that C is not an option
because of other concerns like security. But it sure means that something like
Go or Rust should be preferred over something like Ruby or PHP because it
allows you to run most applications on a much smaller footprint.

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whatshisface
This sounds like a feel-good thing and not a real plan. For example the last
one, about "nourishing." Also, honesty is a virtue, but what does it have to
do with sustainability? I don't want to live in a world where the profit side
makes sense but the virtue side sounds like GPT-2.

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noobermin
This seems good, I just was hoping "sustainable" also means less churn,
because if anything contributes to the waste that makes modern IT less
sustainable, it's the amount of unnecessarily changing things that work.

~~~
matthewdumler
That’s closer to what I was looking for, when I came across this!

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macando
The initiative reminds me of this:

[https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-
space-...](https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-
space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/)

The modern web made possible to represent knowledge in completely new forms
and to easily collaborate with people in your fields of interest. From your
home you can now find a 3D animation of how some piece of engineering or
science works. With AR and VR you can comprehend complex concepts faster. The
barriers to enter science and contribute to solving big civilization issues
are lower than ever. The parts are already in place. What I'd love to see is
how to teach and organize people to use the existing web more efficiently.

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kmlx
this looks very clean, and the principles seem attainable at the least. we
should be leading this fight. congrats!

this being said, one minor nitpick: “The planet is experiencing unprecedented
climate change” is false. and by quite a wide measure. the planet experienced
far worse climate change just in the past 500 millions years:
[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/500-million-year-
sur...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/500-million-year-survey-
earths-climate-reveals-dire-warning-humanity)

that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t approaching dire levels for the current
ecosystem. so the current wording might be necessary. it’s just that the
scientist in me picked this up.

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erik_seaberg
From the name I was hoping for something more related to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11712449),
link rot, and open archives.

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winslett
I feel like I should name drop Cloverly.com for this. It allows you to
programmatically allocate renewable energy and carbon offsets for your
purposes.

Disclaimer: I work there.

~~~
matthewdumler
Disclaimer: That’s dope!

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luckylion
I very much like that the site is a good example of the manifesto: very lean,
still good looking.

~~~
ksbakan
Not very lean to me. It lags while scrolling on my phone.

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KaiserPro
Where are the action points?

A list of sustainable hosts would be the very basic level of information
surely?

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skybrian
Sustainable meaning centralized?

~~~
matthewdumler
Dear god, no.

~~~
skybrian
It saves a lot of energy.

