It's a cool aesthetic, but as a practical movement has some issues with reality. You get stuff like the solar powered website that runs out of batteries when enough people visit it. Cool statement but it would probably have been more environmentally friendly by any measure to deploy on a tiny virtual instance living ephemerally on cloud hosting. Bumping AWS's power consumption up by a tiny fraction vs having a bunch of components shipped to your house.
In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.
It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.
I think this is an important thought, but climate actions are often more than choosing the path of least emissions, especially since the options available are determined by our current economic system.
Sites like the one you're referencing (https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ if I'm correct) don't just exit to be normal sites with less emissions, they're also presenting a vision of the kinds of things our tech world could and should value differently.
It's not quite the right aesthetic but what about having solar panels and an electric car? Or even just an electric bike or scooter. There's definitely a few practical solarpunk-esque tools available to us, probably will be more in the future.
AWS is not a greener solution because it fails to solve the primary goal i.e. DIY, decentralisation and self-ownership.
Besides, the environmental cost of AWS is not the power-draw of your VPS, it's the externalities of monopolistic-capitalism. You are not just funding private jets but a fascist oligarchy and handing them control. It's not even scifi doomerism any more. We are watching in real-time as American oligarchs dismantle environmental laws and I expect there will be glowing editorials in the AWS owner's newspaper.
In a similar vein, I presume that providing AWS as a publicly owned utility (socialism) would also not achieve their goals of individual self-sufficiency. I presume it's more prepper-ish than utopian and considers state centralisation too vulnerable to capture by negative regimes.
