BSD Cafe Billboard

Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Yes, exactly. This instance has tomorrow's build date. That's because littleFedi will be released tomorrow, and I've just made the final builds. They'll be tested on this instance today before being made public. Not long now... #littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse #OwnYourData

How littleFedi will be released The release of littleFedi is scheduled for 1 October 2026. The release will happen in phases but, from the very first day, it will be possible to use the software in its entirety. Tests and complete documentation are still under heavy revision and will not be ready by then, but we do not want to postpone the release any further. The code has already been reviewed by several people, who gave us feedback and suggestions I cared a lot about. I want to thank everyone who did it. You know who you are. There will probably be many bugs because, and this also came out during the reviews, although I already knew it, the quality of the code is not uniform yet. littleFedi was created by different people, at different times, working on different components and with different levels of experience. And it shows: some parts of the code are of good quality. Others are not. The reviews of the last few months tried to make things more consistent, but clearly this is not an easy task. In the end, what matters to me is not that the code is beautiful, but that it is sufficiently lean and secure. So far, the reviews performed have not found security problems serious enough to block the release. Everything else can be fixed along the way. For the moment, distribution will not happen through BSD Cafe Brew, our Forgejo instance, but directly from the littleFedi website: https://littlefedi.org You will be able to download a source tarball, or latest, which will simply point to the same tarball. Inside the binaries directory there will also be around 180 precompiled builds for the different platforms and all the possible feature combinations, for example PostgreSQL + S3. Blog support will be included in all precompiled builds. Of course, those binaries have not been tested on every single platform. I do not have an AIX/ppc64 machine available, let alone a Windows machine. But they compile, and at this stage that is enough for me. For the moment, there will not be fixed releases. New builds and source releases will be published whenever appropriate, distributed in the same way. The goal is to eventually publish everything on BSD Cafe Brew, our Forgejo instance, but this will happen when tests, complete documentation and the rest are ready too. In practice, at this stage the team prefers to keep more direct control over releases and the management of code, patches and so on. The license is still MIT, so there is maximum freedom to use and modify the software. This is simply what the team has chosen for now. The official announcement account will be this one, hosted on the littleOne instance: @littlefedi_official@littleone.littlefedi.social https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@littlefedi_official littleOne will remain online as a test instance. I would not really call it the "official" littleFedi instance, but almost. In the future we may create a larger instance using PostgreSQL, S3 and so on. But this is not really the purpose of littleFedi. littleFedi is about decentralisation and control over your own data. In an ideal world, everyone would have their own Fediverse software, their own instance, different levels of federation, like Bubbles, which still need some refinement in littleFedi, and allowlists and/or blocklists. For now, this is just a small step in that direction, adding another alternative to already excellent software such as Mastodon, snac, GoToSocial, Akkoma, Mitra and others. 1 October is close, and the release will be accompanied by a post containing some background information and details that have never been revealed before. Those details will also help explain some of the technical choices behind the software itself, and why I am the one presenting it to the world. I have not decided yet whether I will publish it here or on my IT Notes blog, but it will definitely be announced. We are almost there. It has been a long journey to reach this point, and the best part has not even started yet. Fasten your seat belts, we are ready to go again! #littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse #OwnYourData

littleFedi will be released on 1 October 2026.#littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse #OwnYourData

@itnotes Good one! Only piece that's worth to mention in your LX zone example is the "kernel_version" parameter and its fakeness.

@santi @ploum That’s why MastoBlaster is totally compatible with snac. It wants to provide a full fediverse experience without sacrificing that much.

As promised, the littleFedi source code will become publicly available in about a week. We will publish a snapshot of the complete source tree, together with some basic instructions to build and run it. Pre-built binaries will also be provided. This will not yet be a proper littleFedi release. Documentation still needs work, testing needs to be expanded, and several things need to be cleaned up before we can call it that. But the important part is that the code will finally be out there. People will be able to read it, build it, experiment with it, start using littleFedi.. Over time, development will progressively move to the BSD Cafe Forgejo, where we will have the usual tools for issues, contributions, releases and collaborative development. We're not quite there yet. For now, the first step is simple: open the doors and let people get their hands on the code. About one more week. #littleFedi #StayTuned #OwnYourData

@tchambers there's currently no support for store and forward. We can't exclude there will be, but it's not there, yet.

For the first time, littleFedi will be shown publicly And I have to say, this makes me very happy. A pre-release build will be running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W at Berlin FediDay, where people will be able to see it, try it, play with it, and probably abuse it a little too. Unfortunately I won't be there in person, because I'll be at EuroBSDCon that same weekend. But really, what better place than FediDay for the first public appearance of littleFedi? A huge thanks to @vortex@tldr.nettime.org - Adam - for taking this on, building the demo, testing it independently, and agreeing to respect the temporary source embargo while we complete the last checks before the public release. I'm especially curious to see how littleFedi behaves once it's in the hands of people who didn't build it. This is exactly the kind of test I was hoping for. More details about the presentation: https://ctalx.c-base.org/fediday-2026/talk/review/AJNLVMPYRSVX3JDHDHYSEZZNSP9KQSYH #littleFedi #littleOne #OwnYourData #Fediverse

Today’s littleFedi updates: Strengthened allowlist-only federation: redirects, discovery, deliveries, and hostname handling now consistently respect the policy. (Spoiler alert: there's a reason behind this ) Fixed boosts for local-only posts, plus a timeline relative-time refresh issue. Fixed an Android PWA green-bar issue by letting the manifest update normally. Disabling remote media caching now safely clears leftover cache jobs instead of leaving the queue unhealthy. #littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse #OwnYourData

Why would I click on a link when you've given me no reason to? Is it too much to ask to provide a single short sentence to describe the thing you're asking others to look at?

There are 48 local accounts on this instance. It may not be extremely active, but SQLite is handling the workload very well. The load is currently close to zero, even though littleFedi is running on a cheap VPS with 2 cores and 4 GB of RAM. It handles federation, lazy media caching, housekeeping and the usual background work while using around 600 MB of RSS. That figure represents the whole process footprint - not just the post cache - and includes the Go heap, reusable allocations, buffers and SQLite memory mappings. When an incoming post is relevant to a local user, littleFedi inserts it into that user’s materialized home feed in SQLite at ingest time. Opening the home timeline therefore requires an indexed read instead of rebuilding it from follows and followed hashtags. A bounded in-memory cache also keeps hot entities, timeline windows and rendered pages ready, while a background warmer refreshes the timelines of recently active users. Cache misses, restarts and evictions still fall back to SQLite, but the normal warm path is very fast. The bubble timeline also uses the cache, although its cold database path still needs quite a bit of work. For comparison, my single-user instance on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses around 60 MB of RSS a few seconds after browsing around. Go’s garbage collector runs automatically and reclaims unreachable heap objects. Some memory may remain reserved for reuse, however, so RSS does not necessarily fall immediately after a collection cycle. littleFedi isn’t trying to compete with snac on minimalism - snac is awesome and remains the best solution for many scenarios. The goal is to offer a different experience while remaining usable across a wide range of hardware platforms and operating systems. #littleFedi #littleOne #OwnYourData