#ResPublicae accounts now have over 70,000 followers (not unique).

Under the hood, Mastodon keeps track of many more users who for some reason interacted with our instance. Over time that becomes rather wasteful, so we've finally activated regular data purging. Such #MastoAdmin hygiene saves us 200 GB in storage.

Even better, we no longer have to worry about holding potentially personal data about thousands of users for no reason. Our #privacy policy now looks better.
https://respublicae.eu/terms

#ResPublicae accounts now have over 70,000 followers (not unique).

Under the hood, Mastodon keeps track of many more users who for some reason interacted with our instance. Over time that becomes rather wasteful, so we've finally activated regular data purging. Such #MastoAdmin hygiene saves us 200 GB i storage.

Even better, we no longer have to worry about holding potentially personal data about thousands of users for no reason. Our #privacy policy now looks better.
https://respublicae.eu/terms

Twitter-Spiegel-Bridges wie #Birdsitelive (bekannteste Instanz: #Birdmakeup) sind umstritten.

Aber was zB #Respublicae macht, finde ich sehr lobenswert: ausschließlich die Twitter-Profile relevanter #EU-Institutionen und -Politiker*innen werden automatisiert ins Fediverse gespiegelt.

So was würde ich mir auch wünschen für #Österreich's offizielle Twitterprofile - z.b. dem RH-Sprecher, OeParl, Staatsarchiv, oder den Ministerien.

@BaronD You can ask that from @eib but I'm not sure they're active any more. I've relayed at https://twitter.com/nemobis/status/1677781508910731264 . Currently #ResPublicae is still half broken due to #TwitterAPI changes but hopefully we're not missing alt text where available.
https://respublicae.eu/@praetor/110606501842531342

#ResPublicae has been upgraded to Mastodon v3.5.9, a security release.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases?q=v3.5&expanded=true

The upgrade was painless. Thank you #MastoDev and especially @Claire[@]sitedethib.com for offering backports to pre-v4 releases and for the clear instructions.

While the details of CVE-2023-36459 have not been published yet, the title suggests the vulnerability may be exploitable even on an instance like ours where no third party can directly post anything.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases?q=v3.5&expanded=true

(Not sure how long, but at least for now #ResPublicae still manages to help people avoid the loginwall: https://respublicae.eu/@ThierryBreton/110654627543076575 .)

#ResPublicae mirrors are catching up on the recent posts, using RSS input for the ever-wonderful #PleromaBot.

We're only able to get the 20 most recent posts from #RSSHub, so any account which posted more than that in the past ~2 weeks will have some posts missing. Some posts also get a bit messed up in the data conversion, so please be patient. (Most issues are already reported upstream.)

Please send patches or donations at https://pleromabot.robertoszek.xyz/pleroma-bot/!

So it finally happened. The #TwitterAPI access used to update #ResPublicae was cut off, all requests get an HTTP 401 response. Some discussion at
https://github.com/robertoszek/pleroma-bot/issues/120#issuecomment-1593688412

@HistoPol Thanks! Most #ResPublicae mirrors are hosted without the original account's explicit cooperation. Hopefully, more MEPs and #EU institutions will notice the benefits of the fediverse and take the lead themselves, so at some point we become redundant.

On #Wikidata you can also see a list of "official" fediverse accounts for MEPs and former MEPs:
https://w.wiki/6mFE

An alternative list of #ResPublicae accounts is now also linked, with the names of national parties and citizenships.
https://w.wiki/6eaK

People sometimes have strong opinions about specific national parties but not necessarily about the European Parliament groups.

Easier lists should make it easier also for moderators of other instances to apply account-level blocks as needed according to their rules (which sometimes don't map easily to EU-level concepts).

More #MastoAdmin trivia/transparency for #ResPublicae.

The main operating cost for this instance is arguably RAM. 4 GB is more than enough, but it's nice to have some buffer. A DB crashing for lack of memory is not fun.

CPU usage varies a lot (but predictably) with traffic. We're on cheap shared CPUs, and 40 % steal CPU at the peak doesn't sound great, but the min idle CPU is over 10 %, so we never really run out of CPU due to bad neighbours. #Scaleway seems to be good enough at scheduling.

In light of the #TwitterAPI confusion, #ResPublicae accounts may go silent any time now.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/06/elon-promises-a-free-api-for-good-bot-content-again-demonstrating-he-has-no-idea-how-any-of-this-works/

The #TwitterDevelopers forum was also shut down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230201030451/https://twittercommunity.com/

We'll work on a solution (or not) whenever we receive official information on what's going to happen to our API keys. We're definitely not going to pay 100 $/month though.
https://github.com/robertoszek/pleroma-bot/issues/120

@JackWolf Sorry about that, clearly #ResPublicae mirroring doesn't go in that direction. Please mute the entire instance (if you didn't already), we won't be offended.

@petrescatraian No, there isn't, but you can send patches to #PleromaBot to implement a feature to map Twitter mentions to fediverse mentions.
https://pleromabot.robertoszek.xyz/pleroma-bot/

We redirect #ResPublicae accounts to #EUVoice official accounts when possible and useful (for example https://respublicae.eu/@EUCourtPress ). The @EU_Commission account provides better mirroring features compared to the often broken mirror at https://social.network.europa.eu/users/EU_Commission , so it wasn't redirected yet.

@hias1234 We didn't stop. As you can see in the Nitter link, the image was posted by a user who's not mirrored on #ResPublicae.

@nellie_m That's a good point and you can send #a11y comments to the relevant #EU service with Europe Direct:
https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us/answering-your-questions_en

Description of images in the European Commission accounts mirrored in #ResPublicae is typically provided in the text of the post or in the linked documents. Sometimes you unfortunately have to follow links through Nitter.

In this case for example the description of the image is "cloud-free view of the Viedma and Argentino glacial lakes in Argentina".

More on my previous post on #botaccounts. Try doing a search for Ursula von der Leyen. There are six accounts. All #bots. 5 are marked as bots. Then there is her #respublicae account, which is also a bot, yet it is not marked as such, so you can't even filter, because it is a #mirror.
@praetor

A #bot filtering system when doing a mastodon search on a person's name would be really helpful.
The enormous quantity of bot accounts on mastodon is becoming quite irritating.
There are now instances who don't do anything else than providing bot accounts, like respublicae.eu. I fail to see the added value.
#respublicae
@praetor

is #respublicae.eu #blocked on this instance? #error “Unfortunately, there was an error looking up the remote account”

is #respublicae.eu #blocked on this instance? #error “Unfortunately, there was an error looking up the remote account”