20 days ago
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:
https://littlefedi.org
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!
#littleFedi #littleOne #Fediverse #OwnYourData