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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