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.

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.

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).

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

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.

I’m suspending the kiwifarms.cc instance. Their public timeline is full of literal Nazi content, pedophilia advocacy, and aggressive trolling. I’d put this off because I hoped it wouldn’t be needed, but there you go.

The weedis.life domain seems to be a ghost ship that is intent on DoSing users by sending them a million follow notices. I’ve suspended them.