I silenced our first domain this morning (and updated the status page) because a user pointed out questionable content and I agreed with their assessment.
Much has been said about that particular instance and I’m not getting into all that. It did want to comment on the rationale behind the action, though:
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.