One of my users complained that they received spam from @mastodon_user_matching@2.distsn.org, whose timeline currently looks like: It turns out this whole instance is screaming with spam red flags: It doesn’t verify email addresses1, The site that the spambot is advertising, MastodonUserMatching.tk, is a redirect to vinayaka.distsn.org (which is on the same domain as the Mastodon instance2), and The bot’s source has the same name (“vinayaka”) as the subdomain it’s spamming ads for.

I kind of fell into a heated argument between well-intentioned people. While I actively do not want to become involved in every disagreement in the fediverse, enough people ended up participating that I wanted to offer my outsider’s take on events. What happened A new user, Pat, joined Free Radical a few days ago. They were active on birdsite but had heard about our growing community and wanted to check it out.

Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again, by @srol@mellified.men Having been on the service for nine months myself, I can confirm Mastodon is not a replacement for Twitter. It’s much better. It is the first place on the internet where I have felt comfortable in a long time.

I’m serving Free Radical’s images etc. from S3. When I updated to Mastodon v2.1.0, I noticed that all the page’s images were missing. Safari’s Show JavaScript Console menu revealed a lot of errors like: [Error] Refused to load https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/freeradical-system/accounts/avatars/000/014/309/static/91f9782fad3f6284.png because it does not appear in the img-src directive of the Content Security Policy. Turns out that some time between the releases of v2.0.0 and v2.1.0, the Mastodon switched from generating S3 URLs like:

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.1.0.

The Free Radical policy on harassment is pretty simple: I will not allow anyone – local or federated – to let a guest feel unsafe. This is my living room and no one can come here and harass my friends. My general guideline is to take the minimum action necessary to address a problem. If a guest can themselves silence an annoying person and that fixes it, awesome. If the problem escalates and requires dropping the banhammer on a whole instance, then so be it.

I want to have a cool logo but I can’t really justify paying to commission one to my family. Conversely, I’m not going to ask an artist to work for free, because I value their work and don’t want to imply that I don’t. So, how I can I reconcile these seemingly incompatible requirements? I’m not sure, but I’ve been tossing this around: One or more artists submit rough drafts of their ideas, I select one that resonates with me and help the artist develop it, That artist gives me exclusive rights to the design so that there aren’t 43 instances with “my” branding, but The artist keeps all merchandising rights, and I help them advertise stickers, t-shirts, etc.

2017 has been a wild ride, but I have a lot to be very grateful for. I am honored and privileged to be surrounded by my lovely Mastodon friends, and to be in a position that I can give back a little to our community. Thank you for being a bright light in an otherwise challenging year.

In the spirit of continued transparency, and because I haven’t remembered to do this in a while, this is an accounting of Free Radical’s hosting costs for November 2017: The DigitalOcean droplet and persistent block storage (for PostgreSQL) was $22.00. The Amazon Web Services S3 media and backup storage cost $3.59. The DigitalOcean CPU usage graph runs consistently at about 5%. Memory is always at about 70%, with most of it used by PostgreSQL for caching.

https://freeradical.zone/ is way #under1000.