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fabiux @ littleFedi
@fabiux
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A red cloth puppet representing a smiling devil holding a yellow trident (FreeBSD mascot). A wall paper calendar in the background.
A red cloth puppet representing a smiling devil holding a yellow trident (FreeBSD mascot). A wall paper calendar in the background.

A local littleFedi instance on FreeBSD.

I absolutely wanted to test drive a littleFedi instance in my local network, behind NAT and having no related DNS entries: don't do it at home!

I have an old Asus VivoMini UN45, connected via WiFi: I've been using it for additional backups only, nothing more, and most of the time that Linux box stayed turned off. There are not so many alternatives in order to reuse such as poor mini-PC but littleFedi is an excellent opportunity to put it back to work!

So I decided to reinstall it from scratch and I chose FreeBSD! And after so many years I'm back using it: once it was running on my old laptop at work for quite a long time.

So, YES, littleFedi on FreeBSD! 👹

I installed FreeBSD from the minimal ISO: it's been straightforward. WiFi network card started working at once and I could fine-tune my brand new BSD box remotely, from my PC. Then I installed, configured and started my littleFedi instance successfully. Finally I installed and configured nginx in order to access and complete configuration via its sleek web GUI.

Next, on one of my public Debian VPS, I installed another instance as a lighthouse and in order to get a working littleMesh. And then my local instance registered on it successfully.

More tests: on another laptop (Xubuntu) I installed and configured a third littleFedi instance on another network, with no GUI and no public address, using the same lighthouse. I could reach and follow this new account from my first instance on the FreeBSD box.

Beside my lighthouse I configured an HTTPS gateway in order to reach my local littleFedi account from my two other public accounts (Mastodon and GoToSocial). Still missing a working directory service (shortener for ugly account addresses like this one), but my tests are successfully completed for now.

Great minimal piece of software! More tests here coming soon.

#fediverse #littleFedi #FreeBSD #VivoMini

Note: I chose this architecture on purpose, just to test it. Of course, you can choose to install littleFedi on a public server, which is much simpler. Anyway, read the documentation and the configuration examples in the source code.

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