CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@pa27 People over 40 still use Facebook thanks to two specific features: events and groups. Local groups, in particular, are an important way to find news about their town and to identify local buying and selling deals.
Some still use Messenger, but it's not a determining factor. The messaging system, however, is crucial for those who use Instagram, which now relies solely on passively viewing reels and actively writing messages to their contacts.

@hpod16

Hi @zompetto

I think we don't really have a valid alternative to the Marketplace for example.

That's not the case. There's Flohmarkt, a federated app that's constantly improving and offers a sort of federated Amazon. Furthermore, Facebook has become indispensable for many people thanks to events and Facebook Groups, but even then we have alternatives: Friendica handles "events" very well, but there are also federated platforms specifically designed for event management (Mobilizon and Gancio). Today, it's also possible to federate WordPress events, thanks to the combination of three plugins (Activitypub, Eventbridge, and any event plugin).
As for Facebook Groups, we not only have systems that manage them from the ground up, like Friendica, but also the entire world I call Forumverso (Lemmy, NodeBB, Piefed, Mbin), which natively manages forum or Reddit-like platforms and can be managed very well by Mastodon. Additionally, there are Android apps for Mastodon like Raccoon (version 1.0 coming soon to the Play Store) that allow you to view groups much more intuitively than the standard Mastodon interface.

Instagram is pretty much covered by Mastodon and Pixelfed, but would it work at scale? (with millions or billions of photos and videos to store and moderate)

Large scale won't be a problem if there are many balanced medium-sized instances that don't overwhelm the subscribers (in fact, a few monster instances with more than 50,000 users can create veritable seismic waves on smaller instances). A truly federated and balanced environment offers far better moderation than commercial platforms, if only because in the Fediverse, the moderator-user ratio is a percentage made up of whole numbers, not fractions, as on commercial platforms.

Whatsapp is a lot harder. I don't think that Matrix is a good alternative

As in the previous case, Matrix (or XMPP) could be a good alternative if there's a true federation and not huge, unsustainable nodes in the long term. The Matrix Foundation, for example, is struggling precisely because it manages a huge centralized server for software designed to be distributed...

and unfortunately Signal is under US influence too.

The way Signal is managed, it wouldn't make a difference if it were American or European: the software is extremely reliable, and metadata collection is kept to a bare minimum.

@hpod16

@christopherstark I'm a big fan of Friendica, but it's clear that, while Friendica has achieved a good level of usability, it isn't and never will be as usable as Mastodon.
Friendica is still the most complete software in the entire Fediverse and deserves a larger community of users and, above all, developers: currently, there are practically three of them maintaining the system!

I recommend trying the Raccoon for Friendica Android app (also usable with Mastodon) because it has significantly improved many of the web version's ergonomic issues. The app is currently still in beta, and I recommend downloading it from GitHub because the one on the app store is still version 0.4 and has some significant flaws.

github.com/LiveFastEatTrashRac…

@zompetto @_elena @luca @hpod16

@iftas I've always thought that identifying suspicious accounts was achieved through a mass search, not by ticking off individual instances. This makes your work even more impressive.

Thanks for the clarification, and thank you for your continued success!

@informapirata @filippodb

@iftas I'm a moderator of the Italian instance mastodon.uno through @informapirata, and I noticed that one of the Russian bot accounts listed is attributed to the mastodon.uno instance.

The account in question was registered on January 12th and began to be active after more than a week. I personally reported it on January 21st and, as administrator @filippodb can confirm, I deactivated it using mastodon's freeze function.
At the same time, all posts published by that account were deleted, but obviously the messages (three in total) reshared by other accounts, messages that contained no problematic content, were not deleted.

The decision to deactivate it rather than suspend it was based on the fact that we were studying the Russian bot phenomenon to understand how often they attacked the deactivated profile, whether they connected automatically or manually, and whether the freeze function helped reduce subscriptions. And indeed, it did.

I would like to add that I personally continue to use this method to combat Russian bot registrations, even on the poliversity.it instance, which I personally manage. Following your report, I have added a silencing action to the freezing process, so that those accounts are not detected by your scraping system.

On mastodon.uno, however, for purely organizational reasons, we began directly suspending all accounts that still manage to bypass the blocks we've placed on the email addresses used to register.

Returning to the main point, I would like to point out that your report only reached us on April 30th, a full 90 days later, and that account had been rendered practically unusable. Your identification of the account was carried out through automated processing (scraping) and resulted in a now useless report because it was not linked to any content and to an account that was no longer usable. A report that was therefore completely rightfully not given priority.

The account was then permanently suspended on May 3rd, three days after your report.

Mastodon.uno is the largest Italian instance, with thousands of active users and dozens of registrations per day. Thanks to a staff of around twenty volunteer moderators, we can keep registrations open with virtually immediate processing times and extremely rapid decision-making.

We therefore ask you to remove the name of the bot that was no longer present in our instance from the list of Russian bots, which had been removed from our instance well before your report.

We believe it is not only unfair but also extremely damaging to our reputation that our instance, one of the most active in combating Russian botnets, should be lumped together with other instances that do not practice moderation at all, or that practice poor or incomplete moderation.

We look forward to hearing from you and thank you for your attention.