ResPublicae.eu admin @praetor@respublicae.eu

I've reviewed incoming reports about a couple accounts, possibly triggered by one of them getting one (1) follower on troet.cafe.

The most serious report was about a probably transphobic post. On the fediverse it would at least need a CW for offensive content, discussion of state violence. The account is now limited.

To understand better, I'd like a private discussion with someone (preferably trans) who knows German and is up to date with current trans policy discussions in Germany.

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).

Currently going through a backlog of about one week. No wonder activity was lower than usual as of late!

Amid long-delayed changes at #Twitter, it seems our mirroring bot no longer works correctly from its usual location, though it seems to work from another machine. It could be that our #TwitterAPI key was revoked and/or our IP address blacklisted. Or maybe something weirder.

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.

Ah. The date has been moved.
https://betweenthelions.link/@ne1for23/109861011947999276

Mysteriously, our API access is still working. It's still February 13th in Honolulu for a few hours though...

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

The top 5 most followed accounts include:

@vonderleyen
@EU_Commission
@CopernicusEU
@EUClimateAction

#ResPublicae followers were well over 50,000 yesterday.

Activity is now picking up again with the new #TwitterMigration wave.

Follow links to the sources through Nitter to verify posts.

Due to unexpected output in Twitter's v1 API, some quote tweets have been posted on #ResPublicae as if they were authored by the quoted user.

The issue is now handled by our mirror sofware #PleromaBot thanks to swift action by the developer. It lasted perhaps a few hours while a new version was being tested.

The cases we noticed were deleted manually.

We apologise for the confusion.

Don't forget to donate to your friendly local #Nitter instance! Think of all the surveillance and abuse you and your friends are saved from every time you use Nitter... 🛡️

https://lacontrevoie.fr/participer/#don offers many avenues for contribution, including membership and donations.

Several other Nitter instances are hosted by non-profits you can donate to:
https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

Hopefully this additional load is welcome and our redirects don't overload the server! 😅 Now we can more easily switch away if our usage is unwelcome.

The #ResPublicae crossposter now points to our own domain https://n.respublicae.eu so that we can update its target to whichever privacy-friendly EU instance of #Nitter is most suitable at any given time.

Thanks nitter.eu and nitter.it for the service so far, and thanks to @ChatonsOrg member @lacontrevoie for providing https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr! We were immediately seduced by the clear and well-principled privacy policy: https://lacontrevoie.fr/mentions-legales/ .

There still isn't a good way to look for other #EU accounts, because I couldn't find any #opendata dataset listing EU agencies/orgs/initiatives/whatever, let alone their social network handles. Most of the accounts in https://respublicae.eu/explore aren't on #Wikidata yet.

Some might be relatively easy to add, like all the language/country variants of the #EuropeanCommission and #EuropeanParliament accounts. (But these might also be run by distinct entities, like local representation offices.) #EP #EC

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!).

Today in confusing reports: a post about the EU budget was deemed a "fundraiser" by some user. I would never have guessed that without a comment.

Interesting week... We're now well over 20,000 followers across all accounts (not unique).

Some accounts have seen their followers increase tenfold in a couple days.