The Bridgy Fed service allows Mastodon users to interact with Bluesky accounts. It annoyed a lot of people at launch by activating the behavior for everyone whether they wanted to use it or not. Many instances, including ours, opted out by suspending the Bridgy instance in response.

They’ve since changed their policy to require individual users to explicitly opt in. That’s reasonable. FRZ users voted to un-suspend Bridgy so that people can choose to use it if they wish, so we’re doing that today.

EU regulators again presume to own the Internet. They do not. Their plan is to vote on an idiotic Chat Control plan that would give them mass surveillance powers.

LOL, no.

As Free Radical is not under EU’s legal jurisdiction, we have zero obligation or interest in complying with it should it pass.

The UK just passed a stupid Online Safety Bill. As a point of fact, Free Radical is not subject to the UK’s laws. As a point of policy, I couldn’t care less about their goofy regulations. It might as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.

In summary, Free Radical has no obligation to, and will not, enforce any bit of the Online Safety Bill (except where it coincidentally aligns with United States and California law).

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.

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.

In the interest of curtailing spammer signups and developing a more personal community, we’re at least temporarily switching to an invitation-only membership model. If you would like to create an account on this instance, or if you’re already a member here but would like to invite a friend, send a direct message to @tek@freeradical.zone.

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.