Summary: Mastodon has few tools for automatedly fighting spam and abuse so I gave up and made one.

We’ve been swamped with a flood of spam for the last few days. Some loser is creating hundreds or thousands of accounts on undermoderated servers and pestering the whole fediverse with junk. Mastodon itself provides no mechanism for admins to reject statuses that contain certain strings, even though many people have begged for this over the years. And while I could learn enough Ruby on Rails to implement such a feature myself, I’m not confident that it would be accepted into the main project and I don’t want to maintain a fork.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.3.0.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.13.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.12.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.11.

EU regulators again presume to own the Internet. They do not. Their plan is to vote on an idiotic Chat Control plan that would give them mass surveillance powers.

LOL, no.

As Free Radical is not under EU’s legal jurisdiction, we have zero obligation or interest in complying with it should it pass.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.9.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.6.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.5.

The Florida House of Representatives approved a bill to ban social media for kids under the age of 16. What is it with that hive of scum and villainy?

There is zero chance, none, nil, that Free Radical will ask visitors to verify their age in a way that would require us to collect personal information. We’ll ignore goofy, unconstitutional laws from other states. If a jurisdiction I care about requires us to collect PII, I’ll move FRZ to somewhere more reasonable. If that fails, I’ll close up shop rather than create a database of our friends’ identifying info.