To say I am excited about #LittleFedi software would be an understatement. What I am seeing from @stefano and the team breaks new barriers for entering in, and participating in, the #Fediverse. Can't wait to test on a self hosted Pi at home. If successful, I shall migrate my long established Mastodon cloud instance to it and serve all from home on local hardware.

I'm finding myself visiting #littlefedi more and more - more than my own #mastodon-instance. I really like that it doesn't look like the #birdsite at all and does try something new just on a visual level. Really looking forward to selhosting this piece of amazing community-software. <3

I've been heavily poking at littleFedi by @stefano and quite excited about it.

I wrote about it in another Blaugust attempt: Big hopes for littleFedi. Also available on my test account ​@shom@littleone.littlefedi.social's post/blog.

#littleFedi #Blaugust #Fediverse #Selfhosting

Big hopes for littleFedi

The Fediverse is exciting, I've formed genuine connections with interesting people. GoToSocial got me hosting my own presence. And I hope littleFedi is what gets to hosting a community.

Thoughts/context on Fediverse {#thoughts-context-on-fediverse}

The federated universe (Fediverse) is awesome: different applications, networks, sub-cultures all able to interact with each other via a rather lightweight protocol, ActivityPub. It's this very lightweightness is interesting because not all the servers are architected to be lightweight because they are architected to scale. There's a lot of debate about the role of centralization, discoverability, "flagship" instances this post isn't that. BUT, decentralization is a big selling point of ActivityPub and being able to run many small instances on low power hardware democratizes participation. I'm all about that, GoToSocial fits the bill perfectly and I have been very happy hosting it and the team is doing great and thoughtful work.

Why am I excited about littleFedi!? {#why-am-i-excited-about-littlefedi}

Well maybe it's a better idea to talk about what is littleFedi is?! I'll let Stefano talk about that: littleFedi: a Fediverse Server That Doesn't Need a Data Centre. That blog is actually served directly by littlFedi and the post was created as any other regular post AND the blog is statically served AND a regular post can be retroactively turned into a blog post AND it supported threaded comments (since it also remains a regular ActivityPub post). littleFedi has a load of other great features as well and I don't want to take away from that but this is definitely what sets it apart from GoToSocial.

Blogging vs Microblogging {#blogging-vs-microblogging}

Blogging and maintaining a separate social feed is difficult. The ability to do it all in one platform and also convert existing posts into blog posts if they need to be persisted as a "body of work" is great for folks who don't want to mess around with tech and just want to share with their community. Also it's cognitively easier to write a series of posts instead of sitting down to write a blog post and being able to convert it later is great.

What's next? {#what-s-next}

I'm on the test instance and have been doing some testing and providing feedback. Stefano is both very prompt and gracious in receiving feedback and fixing issues. The project will be released as a MIT licensed self-hostable application and I plan on trialing a niche community hub (more on that later) using littleFedi. I wish the project well and will be following it closely and eagerly.

This was originally posted on my blog.

Fediverse #Selfhosting #Blaugust #littleFedi

Alt...

"Screenshot of littleFedi default teal and black theme showing a social post with nested comments and likes and boosts metadata

Alt...

Same post as a static blog" alt="The same content has been rendered into a distinct blog interface and the comments from the fedi post are displayed as nested blog comments.

This looks like fun #littlefedi

@stefano@bsd.cafe @stefano@littleone.littlefedi.social Sounds great! I look forward to testing both #littleFedi and #snac2 .

@stefano@littleone.littlefedi.social @stefano@bsd.cafe I have been contemplating moving from Mastodon to #snac2 for a while now – will there be a detailed comparison of #littleFedi to other AP servers at some point?

This is the blog that #littleFedi generates from my posts, when I enable the "Blog Post" toggle: https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@stefano/blog

Stefano Marinelli (creator of the excellent FediMeteo) is working on a new type of lightweight Fediverse server called "littleFedi".

It's still in its early days and under development, but the first test server is now open and Stefano is gathering feedback about it. More info in the quoted post at https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@stefano/a105002b-5749-437d-a3cd-da54dfa70395 and more detail at https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@stefano/4252ae6f-b949-42f8-a021-fd2b698f8b37

You can follow Stefano at @stefano@bsd.cafe or on his littleFedi account at @stefano@littleone.littlefedi.social

#LittleFedi #Fediverse #ActivityPub #SelfHosting

I just built the merge with the branch that enables blog themes, including a few default themes. So, I've enabled the blog for everyone. If you want to test it out... it's live! 😃

#littleFedi #Blogging #Blog #OwnYourData

Really liking the PWA version of #littlefedi - on mobile and desktop.

Great work, everyone involved! @stefano

Dear friend of the #littleOne instance,
you can go to your settings page and...enjoy the themes!

#littleOne #littleFedi #Fediverse

Some friends are joining the Fediverse from other social networks and have fond memories of the old Twitter days. We thought of you, and we’re now merging the branch that brings theming support!

Soon, on littleOne, you’ll be able to choose from a selection of predefined themes.

Stay tuned!

#littleOne #littleFedi #Fediverse

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Screenshot of the littleFedi web interface in Italian, showing a three-column social timeline layout with a left navigation sidebar, central post composer and feed, and a right sidebar for search and timeline shortcuts. The clean white-and-blue design, rounded buttons, tabbed timelines, and overall structure strongly recall the classic pre-X Twitter web interface.

The discussion is going on late into the night, but the decision has already been made. Tomorrow we will try to merge a branch with a very particular change…

#littleFedi

littleFedi: a Fediverse Server That Doesn't Need a Data Centre

I was fifteen, and there were no BBSes in my city. So every call was long distance, once a day, sometimes twice. I'd start the dialer and wait for that sound - the handshake, the negotiation, the hiss settling into a carrier - and then I was connected to a computer sitting in somebody's bedroom, a few hundred kilometres away. I was a co-sysop of a local board and a national moderator of a FidoNet area. None of my friends understood what I was doing, and they'd stopped asking to avoid an incomprehensible monologue. But I liked it, and that was enough for me.

Here's the thing about that computer in someone's bedroom. There was no data centre. No domain, no certificate authority, no hosting provider, no cloud. Just a machine, a phone line, and a person who'd decided to run it. If you wanted to reach it, you called it.

Now look at what it takes today to put a small server on the network so other people can talk to it. A public address, which most home connections no longer have. A domain, which you rent. A certificate, which somebody has to issue you. And, increasingly, a VPS somewhere, because the software won't fit on the hardware you already own.

We've added a lot of infrastructure between two people who just want to talk. That's what littleFedi is about.

What it is

A single Go binary. No Ruby, no Sidekiq, no Redis, no separate worker processes to babysit. You run init, answer a few questions, and you've got a working instance. It speaks ActivityPub, and it speaks the Mastodon client API well enough that existing apps just work.

It also runs on hardware that would make Mastodon - or even Akkoma - struggle. Most software in this space assumes a VPS with a few gigabytes of RAM and a database server next to it. We assumed a Raspberry Pi Zero W behind a home router. There's a low_power mode that tunes memory use, image decoding and thumbnail generation for exactly that kind of box, and it's tested on that kind of box, not just on a fast dev machine.

In spirit this puts littleFedi close to snac, which I've always liked a lot. Same conviction: a personal server shouldn't need a fleet of services behind it.

Federating without a public address

littleMesh is the part I'm most attached to, and it's the part that goes back to the modem.

Your instance generates an Ed25519 key pair. That key is its identity - the node's address is derived from the public key, so reaching that address means reaching the holder of that key and nobody else. No registrar, no certificate authority, nobody to ask permission from.

A small set of public lighthouse nodes help two instances find each other. Once they're introduced, the traffic runs over a second TLS session pinned to both node IDs. The lighthouse copies encrypted bytes back and forth. It never sees plaintext, and it can't impersonate either side. And if the two nodes can reach each other directly, they drop the relay after the introduction and talk peer to peer.

Which is, more or less, calling the BBS directly. Just without the phone bill.

The gateway into ordinary HTTPS

Mastodon and other regular servers can't resolve a mesh address on their own. There's no domain and no certificate for them to find.

That's what the optional HTTPS gateway is for. A lighthouse operator can run one alongside the relay, and it bridges the mesh into ordinary HTTPS for the rest of the web. The gateway has to terminate TLS to do that, so it can technically see the traffic passing through it. Which is exactly why it's a separate, opt-in piece and not something every node exposes by default.

It has two independent settings: one controls what the gateway lets ordinary internet visitors reach at all, and a second one applies again at the destination node. Left at their defaults, both allow only federation traffic - ActivityPub delivery, discovery, public media. Web login, API and media proxy stay closed unless an operator deliberately opens them.

Mesh peers talking to each other directly never touch the gateway at all. That exposure only applies to the bridge into the wider web. And all of this can be self-hosted.

Chronological timelines

Timelines are chronological. Nothing gets reordered by an engagement model.

If you want something closer to "what did I miss", there's a separate /catchup page you visit on purpose. It ranks posts using signals your own instance already has - how many people you follow boosted something, whether it continues a conversation you took part in. No external popularity score, no telemetry, nothing leaves the machine. You press "mark as read", it moves a divider, and that's the only thing it remembers.

Self-expiring posts

You can set a post to expire, with its own timer, instead of a fixed instance-wide setting.

This isn't a client-side trick that hides the post from view. The expiry goes on the same durable job queue that runs the rest of littleFedi's background work, so the deletion survives restarts and isn't lost if the process happens to be down at the moment the timer fires. When it does fire, the post is deleted and a real Delete activity goes out to everyone who received it - so it actually disappears from remote instances too, not just locally. Editing the post before then can push the timer back or cancel it.

Static blogs, with real threaded replies

littleFedi can take a Fediverse post and publish it as a page on a plain static blog, with its own Atom feed and permalinks that don't move even if you edit the post later. No JavaScript, no database hit on page load.

The part I find more interesting is that the replies aren't left out. If the author turns the option on, littleFedi pulls the public replies that were actually federated to the post, threads them the same way the timeline does, and bakes the whole tree into the generated HTML at build time. So a blog post can show a real comment thread, in the same static file, with the same guarantee as the rest of the page - no JavaScript, no live queries. Only public and unlisted replies qualify, obviously. Anything followers-only or direct never enters the picture.

Why it looks like this

This isn't minimalism for its own sake. It's about how many people simply can't run their own server today, because the requirements are too steep. The hardware, the ops complexity, or just needing a domain and a public address before you can start. We're trying to remove those barriers one at a time, while still shipping a real, federating, reasonably complete server: polls, quotes, scheduled posts, MFA, PostgreSQL and S3 if you want to scale up later.

I've written before about taking a semi-truck to buy salad. Hardware keeps getting more expensive and the software running on it keeps asking for more of it every year. That's backwards. If the machines cost more, the operational cost of what sits on them should go down, not up. Same with complexity: the default direction is to keep adding it, and we'd rather strip it out.

And there's the other half, which is closer to why any of us are doing this at all. It's the same thing that drew me to snac and to the way grunfink works on it, and the same thing that had me dialing a stranger's computer at fifteen. People building tools so that people can talk to each other. Nothing more dressed up than that. We'd rather show the servers running, talk about the Pi sitting in the corner, share a tiramisu photo if it comes up. The joy in this was never about the money it brings in. It's about what we end up building, humanly, because of it.

It's beta software, still short of a first release, and I'd rather say that plainly than oversell it. But it runs, and it federates. That's the part I wanted to write about.

#littleFedi #Fediverse

Update since yesterday:

New

• Opt-in federated RSS feed for your account
• Threaded federated replies now show up on static blog posts (merged from an experimental branch - works but not pretty yet, it's a start, watching it closely)
• New followers can require your approval before they're accepted - it was there, just hidden
• Default language, Markdown, and audience settings for new posts (replies/edits/redrafts keep original settings)
• DM button and blog badge on profile pages

Fixed

• Follow/unfollow path
• Video playback
• Search now resolves pasted remote status URLs directly
• RSS/blog reply preferences carry over on account export/import
• Profile pane improvements

All live now. Let us know if anything looks off!

#littleFedi #Fediverse

littleMesh addendum: readable handles and replaceable relays

Yesterday's post left one thing unsolved. Your littleMesh identity is your Ed25519 public key, which is great for security and terrible for a handle: nobody wants to type @alice@a1b2c3...52-characters....mesh.littlefedi.social, let alone read it out loud. And the lighthouse we mentioned, the relay that introduces you to the world, was baked into that identity too. Change relay, and you'd look like a different node.

We've been studying how to fix both, and we think we see a path.

The idea is a small signed directory sitting next to the mesh itself. You'd reserve a friendly alias, something like red-house.mesh.littlefedi.social, and your node would publish a signed record binding that alias to your node ID and to up to three lighthouses. Signed with the same mesh key you already have, no new identity, no new PKI. The record would carry a sequence number and an expiry, so nobody, not even the directory operator, could roll it back to an older version or serve a stale one past its time.

What we like about it is what it wouldn't change. Your handle would stay @alice@red-house.mesh.littlefedi.social, readable. Underneath, WebFinger would still resolve to your real actor ID, the one built from your node ID, exactly as today. And switching lighthouses, would just mean publishing an updated signed record. Same handle. Same actor ID. Nobody following you would notice anything happened.

The directory itself would stay deliberately weak in what it's trusted with. It couldn't produce a valid record for your node ID without your key, and every connection would still authenticate the node ID end to end, so even a malicious or compromised directory could deny service but never impersonate you.

We're building this over the next few days, opt-in, as an experiment. Once it's up, we want to see it survive a real follow exchange with stock Mastodon, snac and GoToSocial, and a lighthouse swap that doesn't touch the handle, before deciding whether it earns a permanent place in littleMesh or gets reworked. Worth trying, not yet worth trusting.

#littleFedi #littleMesh #Fediverse #OwnYourData

littleFedi works like a real app on your phone

A few people have asked me how to actually use littleFedi on mobile, so let's clear this up. I use MastoBlaster, for obvious reasons. But you don't need to build anything native - littleFedi is a Progressive Web App (PWA), and that means it behaves like a proper installed app once you set it up.

• You add littleFedi to your home screen like any other app
• It opens full screen, no browser address bar, no tabs cluttering things up
• It works offline for the shell of the app, so a dead connection doesn't just throw a blank error page at you
• You get real push notifications, even when the app isn't open
• Static assets load instantly on repeat visits because they're cached on the device

Just your browser doing what browsers are supposed to do.

Installing it

On Android (Chrome or most Chromium-based browsers): open your instance, tap the menu, and choose "Add to Home screen" or "Install app". On iOS (Safari): tap the Share button, then "Add to Home Screen". That's it - the icon lands on your home screen and from then on littleFedi launches like a native app, in its own window, with its own icon and theme color.

Notifications that actually work

This is the part people are usually most surprised by. littleFedi uses Web Push, so once you enable notifications from the settings page, you get real-time alerts for mentions, boosts, favourites, quotes, follows, follow requests, polls ending, and a few other events - each with its own icon so you can tell at a glance what happened without opening the app. Tap a notification and it takes you straight to the right place, or focuses the app if it's already open in another tab.

This works the same whether the app is in the foreground, in the background, or fully closed. The browser's service worker handles delivery even when littleFedi itself isn't running.

Why it feels fast

Static files - the JavaScript, the icons, the stylesheets - get cached on your device the first time you load the app. On every visit after that, they load instantly from local storage instead of going over the network again, and the cache quietly checks for updates in the background so you're never stuck on stale code. Your actual content - posts, notifications, everything tied to your session - always comes fresh from the server, since that's the stuff that has to be accurate and can't be cached.

If your connection drops entirely, you'll see an offline page instead of a browser error, so it's clear what's going on rather than looking broken.

No extra app needed

If you're on mobile and haven't installed littleFedi yet, this is really the way to use it day to day. It's lighter than many native apps, updates itself automatically, and you're not waiting on anyone to approve a release in an app store. Just add it to your home screen and it stays there, working like any other app on your phone.

#littleFedi #PWA #OwnYourData #Fediverse