Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.1.5.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.1.4, because 2 upgrades in 2 days seemed fun.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.1.3.

We’re updating the site to the new urgent security release v4.1.3. We may be offline or wonky for a few minutes at a time through the promise. Be back soon!

An urgent-ish software update has us down for maybe 20 minutes or so.

Do you know a cool person looking for a home in the fediverse? Invite them to join us here on Free Radical! Registrations are closed to the general public, but that’s for cultural reasons, not capacity. We have plenty of room to spare.

All FRZ users can create invitation links to share with friends. Please just don’t create an unlimited link and share it with the world at large.

I’ve signed the pact to block any instances owned by Facebook and related organizations that join the fediverse.

At the start of this conversation I wanted to take a “wait and see” approach. I posted a poll asking Free Radical users whether we should block Facebook immediately, shared my thoughts, and opened the door for input. Wow, did I ever get it.

I’m a straight white middle class cis man. While I dislike Facebook, I don’t personally fear it. A lot of my friends are in different groups. They shared their worries, fears, and concerns that wouldn’t have occurred to me because I haven’t lived their experiences. After hearing them, my opinion shifted from “is there a reason we should block Facebook?” to “is there any reason we shouldn’t block Facebook?” I posted a second poll and the results were clear: Free Radical users overwhelmingly want to preemptively block them.

When Free Radical is down, I don’t have a great way to communicate that, because… the site’s down. In the future, I’ll post updates here, tagged with “status”. There are a few ways to access this:

• Visit https://blog.freeradical.zone/tags/status/
• Visit https://status.freeradical.zone/
• Subscribe to an RSS feed of that tag at https://blog.freeradical.zone/tags/status/index.xml

I try not to have the site down for extended periods, but things happen. And when they do, here’s where you can find out about them.

ChatGPT prompt: “Write a theme song for a Mastodon server called Free Radical, which exists to help marginalized people find a welcome and safe home on the Internet.”

Verse 1:
Welcome to Free Radical where we open up our doors
To those who’ve been excluded, who’ve been left out and ignored
Our servers are a safe space where everyone can be
A part of something greater, a community that’s free

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.1.2.