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).

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.

As of now, I’ve enabled Matomo web analytics on this blog (and others I control). I chose this for two main reasons: the software respects users’ privacy and all data is stored locally (and never shared with third parties). I wanted to see aggregated information like which pages are being viewed, but without knowing who viewed them. This seemed like a good, private way to accomplish both goals.

mastools v0.2.0 is now available. It adds a new mastools show-unconfirmed-users command, along with a model for the users table. More info is at https://pypi.org/project/mastools/ .

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.0.1.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v3.0.0.

freefedifollowers.ga was spamming dozens of users with thousands of follows. As it seems that there’s nothing of value on that instance, I suspended it.