About | littleFedi

The Little Computer People

In a period where it is fashionable to boast about the dozens of AI agents doing things on your behalf, we are the Little Computer People.

We are people who love doing things with our computer, who treat it as an instrument of creativity, of expression, of life. Of friendship, of play, of letting off steam, of sharing.

The name comes from a 1985 video game in which a small person lived inside your computer, in front of your eyes, and you could look after him, watch his life and his habits. He would even write you a letter if you asked. People spent hours making sure he did not feel neglected. Somehow the computer became not only a tool for work and for amusement, but something you took care of. That part, that exact part, is what the Little Computer People hold on to.

With one exception, the members of the group have chosen to remain anonymous. That is their decision and it is respected: they are credited collectively for the ideas, work, discussion, testing, feedback and creative direction that made littleFedi possible, and nobody who wants to stay unnamed is named.

Using that name is an expression of identity and inspiration. It does not imply that the group is a company, an association, a foundation, or any other incorporated legal entity, because it is none of those things.

The maintainer

I am Stefano Marinelli. I work in my own company, and I have spent a long time running Unix systems for people who need them to keep working rather than to be interesting. I use the BSDs where I can and Linux where a BSD does not fit, and I have never been very interested in selling anyone a predefined solution. I write about most of it at it-notes.dragas.net.

That is more or less why this exists. Every year I met the same situation from a different angle: someone wants their own presence on the social web, they have a small machine or a spare corner of one, and every option in front of them assumes a database server, a job runner, a build pipeline, a container stack, and a person to keep all of it current. That assumption excludes a lot of good people with perfectly good hardware.

littleFedi is the answer I wanted to be able to give: one binary, one config file, one process, and documentation that tells you what will hurt before it hurts. It solves that problem. That is the whole ambition.

Licence

Every dependency linked into the release binaries is permissively licensed, MIT, BSD, ISC or Apache-2.0, as are the web assets it embeds. Their notices are reproduced in a generated third-party licence file that ships inside every release tarball, regenerated whenever a dependency or a bundled asset changes.

Contributing and attribution

New behaviour comes with the smallest test that proves it, and go test ./..., go vet ./... and go mod tidy -diff all pass before a change is submitted. Performance changes come with same-host before and after benchmarks, and with real-device measurements for any low-power claim.

On copyright: the project carries a single public notice, which is not a claim of ownership over every contribution. Contributors keep the copyright in what they wrote. Code, documentation, artwork and translations are submitted under the MIT License, and submitting a pull request, patch, issue or signed-off commit does not by itself transfer copyright ownership. Third-party material must be clearly identified with all applicable notices.

Contributors who are members of the Little Computer People and wish to remain anonymous will not be publicly identified. They may be credited collectively.

Vulnerabilities go to the private address in the security policy, never to a public tracker.

Status of the project

littleFedi is beta software. Repository tests cover the implementation, but no release is certified until the external checks pass: real federation peers, a real object store provider, a real low-power device, a real restore inside the recovery time objective, and a real 24-hour soak. Those checks have a written list, and rows on it are still open.

The source is not published yet. This site is a preview of what the project is and how it behaves, put up early because the decisions are the part worth discussing before the code lands.

It has not been sitting untouched, though. We have been using it among ourselves for a while, outside the public federation, just between friends: Little Computer People swapping ideas, opinions and thoughts, without bothering the rest of the world and without being bothered by the noise outside it. That is where most of what is documented here was found out.

The software is running in public, though. littleOne is the official instance, invite only for now, and it is the same server this site describes rather than a demonstration build.

Contact

Security reports: stefano@dragas.it, privately, following the policy.
Moderation questions about a particular instance go to that instance's own published contact, not here.

About this site

Hand-written HTML and one stylesheet. No JavaScript, no cookies, no analytics, no fonts or scripts fetched from anywhere else, nothing that phones home. It follows your system's light or dark preference, respects a reduced-motion setting, works at any width, and reads correctly with a screen reader or with stylesheets disabled entirely.

It would be odd to write a server that works without JavaScript and then ship a brochure for it that does not.

Who builds this, and why