Mastodon 4.2.0 added per-user opt-in search indexing. I love this so much. People here have asked me to enable Elasticsearch on FRZ dozens of times. Of course users want to find toots easily without scrolling through hundreds of them! However, it presents significant privacy issues for people who don’t want their toots to be indexed. Who wants to make life easier for a stalker? The new feature handles this thoughtfully. I can enable the indexing feature at FRZ, but it doesn’t process a user’s toots unless they deliberately turn it on for their own account.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.2.0.

At 2:53AM Pacific, our normally rock solid Internet connection went down for 10 minutes. When it came back up at 3:03AM, that should’ve been the end of it. It wasn’t. Short version: I had to reboot the firewall, then everything was fine. Longer version: Wake up at 7-something. Yawn, stretch, pet the dog, look to see what happened online overnight. Dang it, FRZ’s down. Check email. See an email from a moderator from an hour earlier: hey, the site’s down!

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v4.1.6.

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.