ResPublicae.eu admin @praetor@respublicae.eu

"#Nitter is dead", proclaimed the maintainer after yet more #TwitterAPI changes.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-1913361757

Some instances managed to survive a bit longer but now we're suspending updates of #ResPublicae accounts. We'll reassess in a little while.

Since 2023-08-10, our mirrors almost always failed.

We're now trying the #Nitter instance by the excellent @nolog as source. (Trying to avoid excess load.)

Please support them and the Nitter developers if you can:
https://nolog.cz/en/support/
https://liberapay.com/zedeus

The #Wikidata query to find #ResPublicae accounts for MEPs has been updated on our frontpage:
https://w.wiki/62$8

It now includes languages and political groups so that you can more easily find accounts you want to follow (or mute!).

ResPublicae.eu has launched! We want to make it easier to join the #EU policy discourse on the #fediverse.

For now we just mirror on #Mastodon about 1500 #Twitter accounts of EU officials and MEPs as listed by Wikidata and https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/social-media-channels_en.

Example topics:
https://respublicae.eu/tags/IPCC
https://respublicae.eu/tags/EPlenary

Special thanks to @mastohost for the excellent service and @robertoszek for being so helpful with #Stork / #pleromabot.
https://pleromabot.robertoszek.xyz

We were down about 15 min while experimenting with some options to reduce the size of our virtual machine at #Scaleway. (We didn't succeed.)

Crossposting for the busiest ~50 accounts using the privacydev Nitter instance has worked surprisingly well for a few months. (Help welcome to fix the RSS rendering issues which fail to preserve mentions and hashtags: https://github.com/robertoszek/pleroma-bot/issues/131 .)

A few days ago, crossposting stopped as media retrieval fails. We're now crossposting without media.

Here are some charts about Linux resources, courtesy node-exporter, otel-collector, Prometheus and Grafana.

#ResPublicae was down for about 5 minutes as a service was killed by an OOM. Mastodon services spontaneously shut down and had to be manually restarted.

No further action is deemed necessary as we already have more memory than usually necessary. Shifting to a smaller instance would probably increase the need for manual work like this.

To reduce costs (and possibly save energy), we're experimenting with moving older files to cold storage.

For now the simplistic approach is a #Scaleway object storage lifecycle rule to move all attachments older than 180 days to the Glacier class. It's not possible for such rules to target only originals, or mp4 files, or files above a certain size.

In a few months we can consider whether to refine this approach. Feedback appreciated.

#MastoAdmin #ResPublicae

"#Nitter is dead", proclaimed the maintainer after yet more #TwitterAPI changes.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1155#issuecomment-1913361757

Some instances managed to survive a bit longer but now we're suspending updates of #ResPublicae accounts. We'll reassess in a little while.

Since 2023-08-10, our mirrors almost always failed.

We're now trying the #Nitter instance by the excellent @nolog as source. (Trying to avoid excess load.)

Please support them and the Nitter developers if you can:
https://nolog.cz/en/support/
https://liberapay.com/zedeus

#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

Our source is broken again, we'll reconsider the alternatives. (Such as self-hosting or switching to a Nitter source.)

And we're now on v3.5.10.

More information on the importance of the v3.5.9 release:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-tootroot-bug-lets-attackers-hijack-mastodon-servers/

#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

To reduce truncation errors, we caved and increased the character limit for posts to 2000 characters.