I registered freeradical.zone 8 years ago today, and since then I’ve had a lot of fun, met lots of cool people, talked about it on radio shows, ended up agreeing to crazy stuff for Def Con, met Fediverse Chick several times, changed career paths, and otherwise had a wild and wonderful ride.

Thank you for being along for the journey and making it all worthwhile. Let’s make another 8 years of memories.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.3.7.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.3.5.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.3.3.

The Bridgy Fed service allows Mastodon users to interact with Bluesky accounts. It annoyed a lot of people at launch by activating the behavior for everyone whether they wanted to use it or not. Many instances, including ours, opted out by suspending the Bridgy instance in response.

They’ve since changed their policy to require individual users to explicitly opt in. That’s reasonable. FRZ users voted to un-suspend Bridgy so that people can choose to use it if they wish, so we’re doing that today.

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.