Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.3.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.2.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.4.0.

Please let me know if you see any wonky behavior (particularly images not loading, or not being able to upload new images). Thanks!

An critical security vulnerability has been found on the unreleased master version of Mastodon. If your instance is running code from the tag v2.3.3 or older, it is not affected. If you are running a newer version that includes commit ca42f9b, it’s urgent that you upgrade and change your passwords stored in .env.production immediately!

See https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.4.0rc3 for more details.

Who accidentally ran sudo reboot because it was in their shell history? I would never do a thing like that. ahem Pesky gremlins.

Free Radical turns one year old today!

• The fediverse has grown from 250 instances to 2,300.
• The network went from 100,000 users to nearly 1.2 million.
• Free Radical has grown from 1 user (me) to 366, with 44,000 toots.

Thanks for being a part of our journey. I’ve made some great friends here and it’s been a grand adventure. See you online!

FOSTA – the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 – and SESTA – the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 are some likely unconstitutional, certainly unnecessary jackassery. While I agree with the EFF that this is terrible law, I don’t think it’s the end of the world.

FOSTA says:

(Sec. 2) This bill expresses the sense of Congress that section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934 was not intended to provide legal protection to websites that unlawfully promote and facilitate prostitution and websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims. Section 230 limits the legal liability of interactive computer service providers or users for content they publish that was created by others.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.3.3. If you’re on 2.3.2, upgrade as soon as you can!

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.3.2.

I woke up to the terrible news that our good friends on another instance had lost their database during a software upgrade. Godspeed and good luck in bringing it back online. We’re pulling for you!

The Free Radical site backs itself up hourly to a private S3 bucket, and keeps a month’s worth of these snapshots. It’s configured to upload all media files to S3 and serve them from there. In the event of a complete server failure, I could – assuming all goes well – re-deploy the software on a new server and restore from backup without losing more than just users and posts created since the last hour’s backup.