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Just a little reminder on littleFedi's efficiency The instance https://rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it - with my user @stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it - has been running for over a month on a Raspberry Pi Zero W powered by NetBSD. Under normal operation, it uses 58 MB of RAM, including caches. And it shows no signs of slowness! #littleFedi #NetBSD #RunBSD #OwnYourData

Unfortunately, the hosted website is no longer available. That being said, it's still interesting... very, very interesting...https://btxx.org/posts/memory/#smolweb #embedded #rpi #ownyourdata #selfhosting #selfhosted

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

@stefano @mboelen Sounds encouraging. More than 10 years ago I moved my email to one of these large internet providers. Mainly because it was cheap. At the beginning, they charged less than 12€ per year and I got 5 GB per mailbox and up to 25 mailboxes. But slowly they increased their prices, from 12 to 19€ per year, from 19 to 36 and now it’s 5€ per month. The emails are not encrypted, there is literally no support (Which I never needed, tbh) and if they want to, they can say: Hey, our prices stayed the same for more than four years now, so we have to increase again. Not that I can’t afford it, but I don’t like the feeling of not being in control.

Make Your Own Internet Presence with NetBSD and a 1 euro VPS - Part 1: Your Bloghttps://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/04/22/make-your-own-internet-presence-with-netbsd-and-a-1-euro-vps-part-1-your-blog/#ITNotes #NetBSD #RUNBSD #BSSG #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

@rootnode snac2 is minimal and small. It’s well engineered and light. littleFedi is in go and the binary is larger, bringing with it more dependencies, but still trying to be as lightweight and minimal as possible, while supporting all the possible features (like local timelines, bubbles, blog generation, etc). It supports SQLite and, for larger instances, PostgreSQL and the possibility to run more instances on the same DB, to make it more scalable.

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

@soapdog interesting, I wasn't aware of it. Thank you for sharing it!

littleFedi introducing littleMesh We've been buried in littleFedi work lately, and there's one piece I want to talk about because it's the one I'm genuinely excited about: littleMesh. The problem is an old one. Federation assumes you have a domain, a public IP, an open port, a TLS certificate. Fine if you're renting a VPS somewhere. Not fine if your instance lives on a Raspberry Pi in your house, behind CGNAT, with an ISP that will never hand you a real IP address no matter how nicely you ask. Until now, that simply meant no federation for you. Full stop. littleMesh gets rid of that requirement entirely, without asking you to build any of the infrastructure above. On first run, your instance generates its own Ed25519 keypair. That key becomes your identity, no domain required, because your instance's address is derived straight from your public key, in the form <your-node-id>.mesh.<suffix>. Then your node opens an outbound connection to a "lighthouse", a small, publicly reachable relay, and registers itself there. Since the connection is outbound, it works from behind any NAT, any CGNAT, with zero port forwarding. The ISP never even notices. When someone wants to reach you, they ask the lighthouse to open a circuit. The lighthouse introduces both sides, you call back, and it splices the connection together, but it only ever sees encrypted bytes, never your actual traffic. Once the introduction is made, if you happen to have a reachable address after all, both sides skip the relay and talk directly. If not, the relay just keeps carrying you, quietly, in the background. And if you already run an instance with a real domain, you can still turn on littleMesh, purely to reach mesh-only instances. Your own identity doesn't change at all. There will be a default pair of community lighthouses, so you don't even need to find or run your own relay to get started, just say yes during littleFedi init and you're on the mesh. The fediverse shouldn't require you to be reachable. It should reach you. #littleFedi #littleMesh #Fediverse #OwnYourData

The Blog Option in littleFedi littleFedi, like many social platforms, had both a strength and a limit. Posts, by their nature, are ephemeral. They get published, federated (unless local-only, which littleFedi handles) and then, over time, lost. Partly through self-deletion, partly through their normal blending in with the thousands of other posts that pile up over time. Sometimes, though, we want something to stay. And not just stay as a social post, but as an actual blog. A bit like with BSSG, I had thought it would be convenient to have a minimal system. Not to compete with WordPress or other solutions, but to have a small blog, integrated into littleFedi, that would produce and serve a blog updated every now and then, whenever the person writing felt like doing it. And that's why the blog option was born. The idea is simple: when you write a post, from the web UI or from the CLI, there's a checkbox, "blog post". If you check it, that post stops being just a status that will scroll past and disappear. littleFedi renders it into a real static site. No JavaScript, just HTML and CSS, an Atom feed, tag pages, a chronological archive. Nothing exotic, nothing that needs maintenance five years from now. The blog isn't a parallel system you have to feed separately. It's not an export, not an import, not a bridge to some other CMS. The post you wrote is the blog post. Same database, same act of writing, still boostable, still repliable, still part of the conversation on the fediverse side. The blog is just a second representation of the same content, generated automatically. Every time you create, edit, or delete a blog post, the whole static site for your account gets rebuilt from scratch, and the new version replaces the old one atomically, so nobody ever lands on a half-built page. If the build fails, the previous version stays in place. Simple, but it has to work reliably, or the whole idea is pointless. That's the core of it: two representations of the same post. As a status, it lives in the fediverse, interactive, part of the conversation, subject to replies and boosts like anything else. As a static page, it lives on the web, durable, indexable, with a permalink, something an RSS reader can hold onto. You don't have to decide in advance which posts deserve to last. You write normally, and if something turns out to be worth keeping, you flag it, and it gets its own page. One detail I cared about while thinking this through: the generated site has to be self-contained. When littleFedi builds it, media gets copied or hard-linked into the generated directory - images, audio, video. If it's stored on S3, it keeps its public URL directly. Either way, the point is that the site on disk doesn't depend on the instance staying up. If the server goes down tomorrow, the blog files are still a complete, working website. That wasn't an afterthought, it was one of the requirements from the start. Not every account gets a blog, and that's intentional. The instance admin has to enable the feature globally ([blog] enabled = true), and then grant it per account. It's not meant to be a CMS, and I didn't want it to become one. Blog posts can't be replies, can't be boosts, have to be public and top-level. These are constraints, not missing features: the blog is for your own writing, not for threads or reshared content. There's no JavaScript anywhere in the generated site. That was deliberate too. It loads fast, it works offline if you cache it, and it will still render correctly in ten years without anyone having to update a dependency. In the end, the blog option doesn't ask you to choose between writing socially and writing something permanent. You keep writing the way you always do, on littleFedi, and if a post is worth keeping, you check a box. No separate platform, no migration, no vendor lock-in. Just your own posts, some of them rendered into a small static site you can host anywhere, built out of something that already existed on the open web. Remember: all this is being currently served by a Raspberry PI Zero W powered by NetBSD Here's the result: https://rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it/@stefano/blog/691cb62e-e7a1-434b-ba65-d059ee58ac41/ #littleFedi #SSG #BSSG #OwnYourData #Blogging #Fediverse #NetBSD

@elettrona @getprivacy sono pienamente d’accordo. Purtroppo, come dici tu, poche soluzioni non dipendono da attori esterni e sono costosissime. Ma è quella la strada verso cui andare ed è quello il modo, a mio avviso, di dimostrare che la società si sta evolvendo nella giusta direzione.