littleFedi - Official Account
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.
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.
Hello from littleFedi 👋
This is the official account for littleFedi.
littleFedi is a lightweight, efficient and Mastodon-compatible platform for the Fediverse.
The idea behind it is simple: software should adapt to the machine and the community, not the other way around.
littleFedi can run on modest hardware, but it is not designed only for small machines. The same approach is meant to scale with you, from a tiny personal instance to a larger community.
Our priorities are:
- Efficiency, without unnecessary resource usage
- Simplicity, both for users and administrators
- Interoperability, with the wider Fediverse
- Accessibility, including a usable no-JavaScript baseline
- Control, because your instance should remain yours
- No AI features, no magic black boxes, just predictable software and transparent algorithms
The project is still evolving, and we are deliberately taking the time to test federation, scalability and the rough edges before calling it ready.
This account will be used for releases, development updates, technical notes, demos and everything related to littleFedi.
🧪 Demo: https://littleone.littlefedi.social
Small footprint when you need it. Room to grow when you need that too.
Welcome to littleFedi.
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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:
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!
Unless there are blocking problems, #littleFedi will be released before the end of the coming week.
Stay tuned!
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.
@npub1qhw9rp6sd6rse5vay329jlt6j8ll55g3k0r44cm3uadrusns0q0q9684c8@momostr.pink https://littlefedi.org/faq.html - and a couple of people who reviewed the code said there are no clear signs of vibe coding here. They said something more colourful, but that's the meaning 😆
@ticho@mas.to the code is being reviewed by other people before any public disclosure. There are some points that still need to be addressed before it can be publicly released.
@grayrattus@mastodon.social No, there is no binary to download yet. It's a preview of a project that isn't ready for release yet. There's a test instance with about 50 people.
Hello from littleFedi 👋
This is the official account for littleFedi.
littleFedi is a lightweight, efficient and Mastodon-compatible platform for the Fediverse.
The idea behind it is simple: software should adapt to the machine and the community, not the other way around.
littleFedi can run on modest hardware, but it is not designed only for small machines. The same approach is meant to scale with you, from a tiny personal instance to a larger community.
Our priorities are:
- Efficiency, without unnecessary resource usage
- Simplicity, both for users and administrators
- Interoperability, with the wider Fediverse
- Accessibility, including a usable no-JavaScript baseline
- Control, because your instance should remain yours
- No AI features, no magic black boxes, just predictable software and transparent algorithms
The project is still evolving, and we are deliberately taking the time to test federation, scalability and the rough edges before calling it ready.
This account will be used for releases, development updates, technical notes, demos and everything related to littleFedi.
🧪 Demo: https://littleone.littlefedi.social
Small footprint when you need it. Room to grow when you need that too.
Welcome to littleFedi.
2
❤️ 3
1
❤ 2
1
1
1
2
🆒 1
👍 1
🤔 1
1
🥇 1