Free Radical is running on a Digital Ocean VPS. Instead of deploying it manually, I turned the process into a couple of Ansible playbooks¹ that do the right things quickly and repeatably.

I describe what it does in the README, but that’s just a feature checklist. So why would I go through the effort? There are several reasons:

This morning, I moved all of the user-generated content on Free Radical from local storage to S3. It was completely painless and Just Worked – yay! There are a few reasons why this can be a great idea:

I launched the Free Radical Mastodon instance on Friday, April 7, 2017. It was approximately the 250th instance in the fediverse and there were about 100,000 users. Today, 6 days later, there are 613 instances and 222,814 users. Make that 223,021. No, 223,050.

We are growing like wildfire.