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.

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.

I deliberately log as little as possible about my users. My nginx logrotate config is configured to store one week’s worth of access and error logs: /var/log/nginx/*.log { ... rotate 7 ... } As of this moment, that looks like: -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 443615 Jan 5 08:29 freeradical.zone-access.log -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 5405613 Jan 5 06:25 freeradical.zone-access.log.1 -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 395094 Jan 4 06:24 freeradical.zone-access.log.2.gz -rw-r----- 1 www-data adm 407455 Jan 3 06:24 freeradical.