Life is funny

Intro

As we all (should ?) know here, littlefedi is a single go executable.
That's what @stefano keeps telling us.
I don't know about you, but I wondered from the beginning why it seems to matter so much to him that this was a go executable. I mean an executable is an executable, whatever language it has been programmed in.

Go

Go is a fairly new language - barely 15 years old.
It was developped by google, which made the thing all the more puzzling, since google is not really seen as a friend in the fedi world.
That said it isn't bad, as language go (pun intended).
It is basically C++ on steroids. It was created by google developpers who were not happy with C++ but wanted to keep some of its caracteristics. Funnily enough for those of us who have been around a long time, it started its life just like C++ did.
Let me elaborate on that.
When C++ started, there were no C++ compiler. The C++ code was fed to a pre-processor which would turn it in C code, and that code was then compiled by a regular C compiler.
The irony !
The C killer needed C to exist.
Well guess what ? Yep - you got it. Go started exactly in the same way, with a pre-processor for the C++ language called gofrontend.
Anyway.
Go is known for it's high-performance networking and multiprocessing, so it's a pretty good choice for this type of program.

Definitely maybe

In this oasis of thoughts, one thing slowly emerged, and suddenly all was clear !
I knew !!
Of course @stefano will deny it - he never thought about that, it's just a coincidence - sorry mate, but I won't have it.
You see, the whole thing is very simple. Who wrote go ? Engineers at google, yes, but who?
Well I'll tell you.
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, that's who.

Now for those of you lucky enough to be too young to have lived that era or to remember it, I will spell it out: who is Ken Thompson ?
He's the guy who invented, amongst other things, unix and C, not necessarily in that order.
What is @stefano 's Operating System of choice ?
BSD.
What are the BSD ? The direct heirs of the original ATT unix.

Solution

Well there you have it.
The only reason @stefano insists on go is that it is his secret pun. He has gone full circle, running on Ken's OS and implementing his pet project in Ken's language.
Well done @stefano.
I bet you thought nobody would crack that one - sorry to disappoint you... 😈

@stefano

Did some testing with

• xombrero (which you may have known as xxxterm since it started its life on OpenBSD - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xombrero). Works ok except for the huge profile picture but since there are no cookies, every time I change from home to locale (for example), I'm thrown back at login, which ends up on home 😈 )
• lynx : works quite well actually.
• w3s: useable - probably need to reprogram the color default to be really useful but no technical issues
• dillo just sits there ???? After relaunching from the command-line, it seems that the problem is that the pages expects to loads some fonts which it does not find. Maybe having a default font known to be there would solve the problem.
• Web , the gnome browser - works ok, nothing to report - no pic since limited to 4 :-)

Wil continue testing with lesser-known browser

Two major intergalactic events are happening this week !

12 Aug: major eclipse

This one has been flogged to death, but I'll say it again: do not watch unless you have ISO 12312-2 glasses. There will be no warning pain: you'll be blind.

13 Aug: Clacton by-election

You're forgiven if you don't know what this all about. A british MP tried to avoid scrutiny by the ad-hoc committee of millions of sterling he received. Since the enquiry stops if he's no longer a MP, he decided to let the people judge and step down, thereby triggering an immediate by-election in his (former) constituency.
What he did not expect was that the other parties wouldn't play his game, so they do not present any candidate. As Tories, Labour and LibDem refuse to play farage's game at the byelection, Count BinFace declares himself up for the job.
I absolutely love this - it can go 2 ways, and both are equally enjoyable:

• either farage is elected: his gamble failed (even though he won himself some time to hide the evidence) and the parliamentary enquiry resumes

• or Count BinFace wins and farage looks like an idiot.

In a nutshell, people of Clacton have a choice between the bin or the garbage.
Sit down and pass the popcorn...

PS: for those not familiar with the UK election system, it is customary to have not-so-serious candidates / parties like The Official Monster Raving Loony Party, lead by Screaming Lord Sutch (RIP), today's Alan "Howling Laud" Hope, etc.
Should count BinFace win, we'll see if he makes good on his election pledges, such as capping the price of 99 Flake ice creams at 99p and becoming the UK entry for next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

@stefano
A useful information for all future self-hosting people is the space taken by the database/media.
As you can see on the screenshot taken from polyglot.city the media take a huge space, more than anything else.
Hosting on raspberryPi is nice, but I doubt the 32G SD will be sufficient, unless littleFedi has another way of treating media (like not copying the media locally but referencing them or something).
By the way and talking about raspberries, there is a filesystem available under Linux which was created specially to extend the life of your SD card: f2fs (see here: http://whitehorseplanet.org/gate/topics/documentation/public/howto_ext4_to_f2fs_root_partition_raspi.html )
And of course, if you can avoid SD altogether and boot on something else, all the better.
All recent RP support it, if yours is old you just need to reflash the firmware. The only RP I have which does not support it is a RP2 with a firmware < 1.2 (and no possibility to upgrade).