I registered freeradical.zone 8 years ago today, and since then I’ve had a lot of fun, met lots of cool people, talked about it on radio shows, ended up agreeing to crazy stuff for Def Con, met Fediverse Chick several times, changed career paths, and otherwise had a wild and wonderful ride.

Thank you for being along for the journey and making it all worthwhile. Let’s make another 8 years of memories.

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.

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

The United Federation of Instances is a bad idea, and Free Radical will not participate.

The “UFoI” is an organization of fediverse instances making a compact: if an instance enters the compact, and they abide by the group’s Code of Ethics, then all members of the group promise not to disconnect from or block that instance. If one instance believes that another is violating that Code of Ethics, then they can present evidence to the elected board of the group. If the board agrees with the evidence, they may vote to remove the accused instance from the organization and the protection it offers. I understand why that sounds attractive to potential members, but I think joining a group like this is an awful idea.

I want to have a cool logo but I can’t really justify paying to commission one to my family. Conversely, I’m not going to ask an artist to work for free, because I value their work and don’t want to imply that I don’t. So, how I can I reconcile these seemingly incompatible requirements? I’m not sure, but I’ve been tossing this around:

• One or more artists submit rough drafts of their ideas,
• I select one that resonates with me and help the artist develop it,
• That artist gives me exclusive rights to the design so that there aren’t 43 instances with “my” branding, but
• The artist keeps all merchandising rights, and I help them advertise stickers, t-shirts, etc.

Releastically, that probably wouldn’t generate a lot of revenue (although I’d certainly buy some stuff for myself). However, the artist would get 100% of all income from it. If I’m the only one who buys a t-shirt, it’s not that great a deal for them. If I help them sell a hundred shirts or somehow become Internet famous, that could be a nice chunk of change, of which my cut would be $0.00.

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.