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.

Releastically, that probably wouldn’t generate a lot of revenue (although I’d certainly buy some stuff for myself). However, the artist would get 100% of all income from it. If I’m the only one who buys a t-shirt, it’s not that great a deal for them. If I help them sell a hundred shirts or somehow become Internet famous, that could be a nice chunk of change, of which my cut would be $0.00.

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. Disk usage is at about 0% except during hourly backups. Bandwidth averages about 20Kbps except during those same offsite backups.

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

I’ve had a hard time going cold turkey with birdsite but it gets easier by the day. I still think of it as the early service that was new and different and exciting and wasn’t being used as a machine for spreading hate. I need to break that habit, but it’s hard.

This morning I drank deeply of that cesspool and was shocked at how horrible it is. Was it always that bad and I was just used to it, or has it taken a recent and sharp turn for the worse? I don’t know. Either way, here we are.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.0.0.

Free Radical celebrates its 200th verified user.

The victory parade was well attended.