ResPublicae.eu admin @praetor@respublicae.eu

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.

It's easy to tell the server was a bit busier.

#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

Due to the growth of the #fediverse, which may have passed 10 million registered users depending how you count, we had to update our #DigitalServicesAct (#DSA) disclosures.
https://respublicae.eu/about/more

Other possibilities exist. The principle of least astonishment could be a guiding factor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

We could mark posts from certain accounts unlisted if they regularly post to hashtags in ways which don't belong.

We could also forcefully add CWs to posts, but so far we don't. It's hard to come up with a CW which would be applicable for all accounts, or for entire classes of accounts equally. A catch-all CW like "From birdsite 🐦" is broadly correct but also potentially unhelpful.

Some accounts with no followers are sometimes considered problematic too, even though they're hard to find. Someone may accidentally stumble on something they were not prepared for.

I've surveyed a few accounts from known-controversial quarters and I've marked a few as forced-sensitive. I've also disabled mirroring RTs where they're mostly not about EU policy.

The #EuropeanParliament has a page on "Appropriate behaviour rules":
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/at-your-service/en/transparency/appropriate-behaviour

The Rules of Procedure, at Rule 10(1), state that:

«The conduct of Members shall be characterised by mutual respect and shall be based on the values and principles laid down in the Treaties, and particularly in the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Members shall respect Parliament’s dignity and shall not harm its reputation.»

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RULES-9-2019-07-02-RULE-010_EN.html

Rule 176 deals with sanctions.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RULES-9-2019-07-02-RULE-176_EN.html

Another account seems to convey generic anti-establishment messaging. Its videos were not reported but I've made them forced sensitive.

Reports with specific clarifications on why a post is problematic are very welcome. (Often posts walk a fine line on topics like immigration, promotion of diversity.)

It's less helpful to send reports with no comments, about no specific posts or about generic policy disagreements (such as reporting anti-renewables posts, generic snipes against other parties).