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littleFedi - Official Account@littlefedi_official@littleone.littlefedi.social
Official account for littleFedi.
A lightweight, efficient and Mastodon-compatible home for the Fediverse.
Built to scale from tiny machines to larger communities, while keeping things simple, open and under your control.
Your server. Your community. Your Fediverse.
https://littlefedi.org
Joined: 2026-10-01 18:02:10
3 notes, 0 following, 0 followers
littleFedi - Official Account@littlefedi_official@littleone.littlefedi.social (2026-10-13 16:30:00)
A new build of littleFedi (2026.10.13) is out!
We've made several changes based on reports from our friends on this instance, feedback from those who have started self-hosting, and code reviews by the Little Computer People.
Here's a non-exhaustive changelog:
Alt text changed while editing a post from a Mastodon client (Mastodon web,
Phanpy, Elk, Ivory, Tusky and others) was silently dropped. It is now saved
and sent to other servers with the edit.
Alt text of images already attached to a post can now be edited from the web
composer.
When a remote author adds or changes alt text by editing a post, the change
now shows up here too. Before, the post kept its old description, and stayed
hidden for anyone filtering out media without alt text.
PUT /api/v1/media/:id can now clear a description, and refuses media that
is already attached to a post, as Mastodon does. Use the status edit instead.
Alt text is limited to 1500 characters on the server too, not only in the
browser. Longer remote descriptions are cut at the same length. The limit is
reported as description_limit in /api/v2/instance.
Media without alt text now report description as null in the API, so
clients no longer show an empty ALT badge.
New Favourites page in the web interface, in the main menu, listing the
posts you liked, most recent first.
Paging through /api/v1/favourites skipped or repeated posts after the
first page. It now continues from the last post shown, like bookmarks.
When the timeline tabs or the top menu do not fit on one line, they now
show only their icons. Before, some themes cut the last items off or split
them over two rows.
Keep the canonical instance actor URL public in secure and allowlist modes,
fixing a key-fetch deadlock with other authorized-fetch servers.
With split domains, /api/v1/instance now reports the handle domain as uri,
and actors carry a webfinger property with their canonical handle.
Hashtags can now be followed from the search in Setti
littleFedi - Official Account@littlefedi_official@littleone.littlefedi.social (2026-10-02 02:06:55)
Thank you, @dch@bsd.network
One of the peculiarities of littleFedi is that it was developed and tested first on the BSDs, then on illumos, and only later on Linux.
The first public instance, my own @stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it account, runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with NetBSD.
I don’t think many social platforms have started out on NetBSD in recent years.
#NetBSD #FreeBSD #littleFedi #Fediverse
littleFedi - Official Account@littlefedi_official@littleone.littlefedi.social (2026-10-01 16:01:23)
The Little Computer People Present littleFedi: Our First Public Release
"Hi,
We would like to show you a small project we've built and used over the last few years.
It's a Mastodon-like platform that federates using its own protocol and can work even without HTTPS or public Internet access. Many of us have restrictions on our communications, and this project has helped us stay in touch and have our own social network. We'd love to show it to you and hear what you think, because your OwnYourData message really resonates with us."
The Story
And this email sat ignored for weeks.
It came from an anonymous, generic mailbox, with an even more anonymous and suspicious subject. The spam filter had classified it as, well, spam, for other reasons too. Only when I checked the spam folder again, weeks later, did I move it to the Inbox. "Why not?", I thought. And I asked to see what they had built.
There was no way for me to connect to one of their instances. They trusted me and sent me the code which, although fragmented and loosely put together, compiled and ran natively on FreeBSD. But before that: "We only ask you to never say anything, at least until we're ready. We don't want to be visible and, inevitably, judged or attacked. We tried something else before and backed away. Our software isn't high quality and we know it. But it works, for us, and we have fun building it. When it works we're happy, shut away in our rooms, often in the middle of the night. Sometimes, joking, we say we're like little people living inside our computers and that, thanks to this software, we can talk to each other."
At that moment I smiled and thought of a 1985 video game, from my childhood, that was quite revolutionary at the time: "You're like Little Computer People". They liked it. And that's how the group got its name: the Little Computer People.
My first test went well. I was immediately struck by the lightweight interface. "We have old