Post by @stefano

@Linux@planet.moe littleMesh lets a littleFedi instance federate without a public IP address, a
DNS name, or an inbound port: from behind home NAT, behind CGNAT, on a laptop,
on a Pi plugged into a router nobody administers.

It is an additional transport, not a new protocol. ActivityPub, WebFinger, HTTP
Signatures, media fetches and the delivery queue all run over it unchanged.

Two kinds of machine take part:

• a node is an ordinary littleFedi instance that cannot accept incoming
  connections;
• a lighthouse is a small publicly reachable relay that introduces nodes to
  each other and copies encrypted bytes between them. It stores no accounts,
  reads no messages, and hosts no identities.

You need at least one lighthouse somewhere. It can be someone else's, a €3 VPS
of your own, or a machine you already run with a public address.

But we're also planning to run two "public" lighthouses and let the "littlefedi init" process to pre-configure them. Going online will really be a matter of seconds - without even needing a reverse proxy.