This is something that's been bugging me as a side quest.
I am doing a PhD in decarbonising how energy-eating, but as a side quest, I noticed that when
I publish my podcast RSS feed, it's being pulled down a thousand times more than
being needed by all the big players.
I reckon just the four Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and whoever it's pod being, are between
them wasting 100 kilowatt hours of electricity globally, just pulling down podcast feeds.
Anyway, here we go.
So the problem is that even with well-understood protocols, federated ones, like a rule
festival now in our social media, and podcast and RSS is coming back because certain actors
in social media are not making themselves popular, even though some of these protocols
are 20 years old, more, they're being used very badly.
So the problem is in theory if you have a federated system, like say the Fediverse, that there's
no one player that is so powerful that if they behave badly, you have to continue to work
with them.
The problem is, for example, with Apple's podcast directory, as if you don't appear in
there, lots and lots of people never know about your podcast at all.
So Apple is very influential, likewise, Amazon, likewise, Spotify.
And as it happens, therefore, they will not spend the roughly day of engineering at work
it would take to avoid 99% of the waste they're currently inducing.
So I've put, I've named Apple, Amazon, and Spotify here.
There's another player I'd never even heard of called pod being, who, so, I deliberately
didn't update my podcast for three months, guess how often pod and being polls every day
to see if I've changed my mind, they would like to guess an order of magnitude?
How much?
Not quite that bad, but it is literally every six minutes, right?
Okay, next one.
So order of magnitude solutions here, so I've written a little archive paper all they will
put it up soon, but I wrote five things you can do that they could do to be better.
So whenever you do a request over HTTP, which is how podcast feeds are retrieved, I respond
when I serve the file back to you with a content max age, how long it should cash it for.
If you're beating me too fast, I serve you a 503 or 409 error, I say a request after.
So I give you some fairly strong clues, they're saying, that is no point in polling me
again in six minutes time.
In fact, I quite often say, come back in a day, no one pays any attention to any of those
whatsoever, right?
That's the first thing.
If your browsers were like that, your browsing experience would be awful, so this
is really, really basic stuff, which is a two-tone HTTP one.
But I also suggest some defensive rules that you can put into your static configuration
for your web server.
So I was, I had some fun where Apple doesn't even allow you to compress the response,
which isn't really stupid because our assesses at least like four times compressible.
So I randomly reject three out of four of their requests, which gets the bandwidth back
to roughly where it would have been if they had done the right thing in the first place.
So my estimate is seriously, if those four top users would spend the day to actually
respect the 20-year-old elements of the protocols that they're ignoring, it would save,
well, a considerable amount of money and carbon.
And another problem is that the creators of podcasts are not rich people often, right?
They're not all Joe Rogan or his name is.
So they're paying bandwidth charges because Apple can't be bothered to do it right.
But I mean, no, probably no extra person will die from the extra carbon emissions from
these things.
But it's a bit of a canary in the coal mine, it's about like anyone here who is running
a web server has been blasted by OpenAI and everyone else scraping their content, right?
But if you can't be bothered to fix something as simple as this, which all the tools
you need to use in all the protocols had has been in place for two decades, what chance
have we got the people are going to be responsible with newer, really power hungry things
like AI?
So this is my view here.
Now, who knows about Rachel on the Bay?
No?
Okay.
So there, me and a German guy and she have all encountered this problem.
And she has got a sort of feed tester that you can connect your podcast retriever to
and see how well it behaves.
And it will be quite nice.
There are many initiatives, you know, where you go and test your website and see how green
it is.
If Apple could point to their thing at yours and you say, oh, you're an E this week.
Because of course, we're all sort of engineers in this room, right?
So if you see a number, you can make number go up.
So if we made this really easy for people to do, I think we take out a whole chunk of waste
out of this piece of the ecosystem.
Right.
So this is the bottom of it.
Let me say the bit I'm not talking about here is every podcast feed now allows you
to specify multiple versions of the same media.
So by default, you'll get served an MP3.
But you can also say, oh, I'm on my mobile phone, I'd like Opus instead, save 10 times
the bandwidth of the data being transmitted as well.
So guess how well that implemented is.
So there's a lot of waste here, which could be very easily removed, which would be climate
saving, bandwidth saving and money saving.
There we go.
That was my lightning talk.
OK, well, if there's any questions, please go ahead.
Oh, all right.
Yeah, we could do things badly, too.
Yep.
Your presentation and the recommendations you do, are they online?
Yeah, if you go to my site, which is earth.org.uk, and search for RSS in the search box,
it's called RSS inefficiency is the thing.
And you can search for it now, it's up and you can do Google scholar, I think now as well.
Yeah.
So one thing which happily blokes Facebook scraping is the same thing I do with Apple,
which is if they will not even offer GZP as an encoding format off, it's a technical term.
And it's great.
And that blocks all the Facebook straight things straight off.
If they will not even let you compress the stuff, just don't go away, because there's no
good reason for that for any substantial use.
And so there's a bunch of things.
If you look on my page, you'll see there's a few there, RSS specific, but they're very easy
to adapt.
And it's just config in the web servers.
Nothing else.
Anything else?
OK.
What's OK, it's the oven.
Improving UK home heating decarbonization.
Anyway, it's also avoiding wasting energy doing other things we want to.
I mean, you have all the data, you have all the statistics, which you have together.
I mean, you have the considerant, I mean, it's, again, on your card and your time, yes, you
would have been spent.
Have you considered, like, some automatic responses for the big contributors by having, I
don't know, an automatic mail that's sent to some Facebook threat for something like that.
There's no where it's go.
You do know, for example, I do know a bloke inside Amazon, who's pretty senior.
And I've told him about this, and he is cringing suitably.
But I mean, you know, there's nothing you can do.
I am hoping, ultimately, by publishing on archive and by coming, giving talks like this,
that eventually, someone will be embarrassed enough at one of the organizations to go and
say, why are we doing this?
But I have no more control on that, right?
Right?
I think we might be done.
Thank you.