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.

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.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.3.1.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.3.0. Admin tip: if you’ve set UID and/or GID in your .env.production, be sure to update Dockerfile with ARG UID=... and ARG GID=.... If you don’t, you’re going to get lots of permission errors in the docker-compose run --rm web rails assets:precompile part of the upgrade process. Don’t be me.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.2.0.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.1.2.

I deliberately log as little as possible about my users. My nginx logrotate config is configured to store one week’s worth of access and error logs: /var/log/nginx/*.log { ... rotate 7 ... } As of this moment, that looks like: -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 443615 Jan 5 08:29 freeradical.zone-access.log -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 5405613 Jan 5 06:25 freeradical.zone-access.log.1 -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 395094 Jan 4 06:24 freeradical.zone-access.log.2.gz -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 407455 Jan 3 06:24 freeradical.

The Free Radical Ansible repo commit 5d91a34 now supports both pre-Mastodon 2.1 and Mastodon 2.1+ S3 media URLs in CSP headers.