Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.1.5.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.1.4.

We had severeral hours of downtime yesterday because of a “fun” PostgreSQL problem (see Beware of your next glibc upgrade for details). Short version: because there are lots of ways to encode text, and they can change subtly when you upgrade your OS, some of your unique database keys may end up being not so unique. This resulted in quite a few Mastodon tables having duplicate rows, despite having unique indexes. It also meant that PostgreSQL was all like “indexes? lol never heard of ’em” and query performance was pretty awful.

Happy (slightly belated) anniversary to all Free Radical users and friends. It’s been a fun time, and here’s to many more!

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.1.3.

Quick, temporary policy update:

Effective immediately, medical advice regarding COVID-19 not sourced from legitimate scientific or medical outlets is forbidden content. If you see someone advocating essential oils or colloidal silver or other junk quackery, please report it.

This is not a free speech zone. Misinformation that makes people dead is not “oh well we all have opinions”.

The sneak.berlin instance is a small or single-user instance operated by a software author who writes hostile instance-scraping bots. On the web page for that software, in the ironically named “ethics statement”, he writes:

Publishing your toots/messages on a server without marking them private or requiring authentication and thus making them available to the web is an act of affirmative consent to allowing others to download those toots/messages (usually by viewing them in a browser on your profile page). If you don’t want your toots downloaded by remote/unauthenticated users on the web, do not publish them to the web.

The search.fedi.app instance seems to be designed around following Mastodon users and indexing their content. No thanks.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.1.2.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.1.0.