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Eugen Rochko

Turns out around 700 GB of media storage on mastodon.social was being consumed by multiple Twitter "bridges" running on different domains, reposting Twitter users' tweets into the fediverse as far as I'm aware without their (the Twitter users') participation or knowledge.

That's 10% of our media storage accumulated over 6 years. At least cross-posters set up their own accounts, that's still legit use. This, it just feels so wasteful. How Twitter even gives out API keys for this, I don't know.

17 comments
stux⚡

@Gargron Pff, that's a load..

How often do you clean external media on .social and .online?

DELETED

@Gargron
Ah, I guess this explains the 504 errors I got a few times?

Anyway, thanks for sharing this insight into the legality, not everyone thinks about that and it's good to remind people 👌

Григорий Клюшников

Heh, that's why Smithereen stores remote media in a LRU cache of a configurable limited size, instead of storing permanently. The downside is that it takes noticeable time and way too many roundtrips to load each remote image when it's first accessed.

Eugen Rochko

@grishka Our cache isn't permanent either, but the eviction is a manual process. Well, manual unless you put it in cron. But that's not the point. It's still wasteful, it still costs money and processing power even if it gets removed eventually, and for what - ghost accounts

gudenau

@Gargron They don't, you have to request them for this usage and I was denied one.

Gregory Vanderlaan

@Gargron Block 'em... I post the same content on 13 different social media platforms but... I do it intentionally... I choose to post on each of them because I want my words read by as many people as possible... and Just using FaceBorg and Twitter ignores hundreds of my followers... I limit my mastodon posts because I have some respect for this platform... Unlike Twitter... I spam them like crazy!

Gracious Anthracite

@Gargron

Can I make a polite request to improve Masto’s media deduplication at some point for dealing with just this sort of stuff?

tze

@Gargron For make you a miniCEO subsidary of twitter: same politics, same censorship. mastodon.social sucks.

mandy

@Gargron i would dare do that i'm working on getting people to ditch twitter to come here i'm about to delete my twitter account absolutely love it here much kudos to ya

Tim Chambers

@Gargron Wish there were a better way to federate content in.

Damian

@Gargron it's so important that content creators, viewers, data analysists and technology enthusiats alike to come together and start investing in smaller websites and social media outlets

eons Luna

@Gargron snap, I might be guilty of this (I have Twitter-Mastodon crossposting enabled).

Should I turn it off?

Eugen Rochko

@eonity It's fine, you're obviously here and reposting of your own volition. It's the third-party bots that really bother me.

Notizie da Poliverso
@Gargron @eonity We must also begin to understand that it is not useful to bring the twitter garbage in the fediverse: cross-posting is good especially if it brings contents FROM the fediverse TO twitter. On mastodon you can see too many users duplicating their contents from twitter, even if they are not robots: it is not a service that is good for the fediverse!
Here, at Friendica (which allows for easy crosspposting), I'm trying to explain to my friends at the instance, that bringing content from twitter is only okay occasionally, and ONLY IF that content brings value to the discussion.
@Gargron @eonity We must also begin to understand that it is not useful to bring the twitter garbage in the fediverse: cross-posting is good especially if it brings contents FROM the fediverse TO twitter. On mastodon you can see too many users duplicating their contents from twitter, even if they are not robots: it is not a service that is good for the fediverse!
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