Upgraded to v1.6.1
Free Radical is now on Mastodon v1.6.1.
Ansible makes Docker faster; fixes certbot renew error
The Free Radical Ansible repo commit 76a0107 fixes two problems:
- Docker uses aufs instead of overlayfs because overlayfs is ridiculously slow during an important container startup step
- Sets the root directory for HTTP connections so that
certbot renewcron jobs complete successfully
Welcome to my living room
Several times I’ve compared this instance to my living room. I think that’s a powerful and accurate analogy and I’d like to explain what I mean by that.
Even if no one else came around, I’d still have my home and my living room. It’d be boring and quiet, though! I’d much rather be surrounded by friends, and if you’re in my house, I assume that you’re my friend. I’m glad you’re here and want you to have a nice time! I also imagine that we’re in an apartment complex, surrounded by other people who also have living rooms and have invited friends over.
Unexpected outage
The server was down from about July 5, 2017 11:30AM PDT to about July 6 8:15AM PDT. I rushed off an apt-get update and didn’t check its results before rushing off to something else. Sorry for any inconvenience!
I’ve set up monitoring with Uptime Robot to notify me about any future outages so you won’t be sitting in the dark.
The Brand Comes Around
Mastodon is our nice little safe haven away from the rest of the world. No one wants to see it packed with ad content, so we’ve all put things like “no commercial stuff!” in our site descriptions and patted ourselves on the backs.
When companies discover Mastodon and come calling, none of that is going to help one bit.
Milestone: 100!
On June 18, 2017 – a little over two months after launch – Free Radical got its 100th verified user. Onward and upward!
I made a celebratory baked potato, but since no one showed up to share it, I ate it myself.
Market-leading growth
Our user base has grown by 24% since yesterday, and at this rate we should have 100,000 users a month from now. I’m in talks with venture capitalists.
No, really, an entire month with S3
A couple of weeks ago, I described a month’s worth of experience with hosting Free Radical’s media on S3. This update responds to some predictions now that I have an entire calendar month under my belt.
One month in with S3
When I was estimating Free Radical’s operating costs, I predicted that S3 storage growth would be linear. That turned out to be very much the case.
Costs of hosting a small server
I had no idea how much it would cost to host a Mastodon instance. This is for everyone like I was who’s thinking about running their own server but wants to know what to expect.
Free Radical currently has 62 users. The numbers here are what I pay our small little instance and would certainly jump up if we grew by a factor of 100x.