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@fullywoolly@mastodon.social the idea came both from cloudflared and #DeltaChat relays. Dumb relays, that just interconnect people.
The only difference is that Delta Chat relays store messages, littleMesh doesn't
@Linux@planet.moe the lighthouses can be self hosted and you can set multiple ones for failover. The first "official" two will share the same suffix, so they're totally swappable.
littleFedi introducing littleMesh
We've been buried in littleFedi work lately, and there's one piece I want to talk about because it's the one I'm genuinely excited about: littleMesh.
The problem is an old one. Federation assumes you have a domain, a public IP, an open port, a TLS certificate. Fine if you're renting a VPS somewhere. Not fine if your instance lives on a Raspberry Pi in your house, behind CGNAT, with an ISP that will never hand you a real IP address no matter how nicely you ask. Until now, that simply meant no federation for you. Full stop.
littleMesh gets rid of that requirement entirely, without asking you to build any of the infrastructure above.
On first run, your instance generates its own Ed25519 keypair. That key becomes your identity, no domain required, because your instance's address is derived straight from your public key, in the form .mesh.. Then your node opens an outbound connection to a "lighthouse", a small, publicly reachable relay, and registers itself there. Since the connection is outbound, it works from behind any NAT, any CGNAT, with zero port forwarding. The ISP never even notices.
When someone wants to reach you, they ask the lighthouse to open a circuit. The lighthouse introduces both sides, you call back, and it splices the connection together, but it only ever sees encrypted bytes, never your actual traffic.
Once the introduction is made, if you happen to have a reachable address after all, both sides skip the relay and talk directly. If not, the relay just keeps carrying you, quietly, in the background.
And if you already run an instance with a real domain, you can still turn on littleMesh, purely to reach mesh-only instances. Your own identity doesn't change at all.
There will be a default pair of community lighthouses, so you don't even need to find or run your own relay to get started, just say yes during littleFedi init and you're on the mesh.
The fediverse shouldn't require you to be reachable. It should reach you.
You’ve just been Rick-rolled!
Good night, world!
@luca@sironi.xyz e tutti che ti dicono di non postare nel Fediverso le screenshot degli altri social 😂
The weekend is almost over.
Someone should plan a serious and accurate study about the time compression that happens during the weekend.
@SecondChanceLemon@rebel.ar in the last few days, some more branches have been integrated and we're testing them.
The team did a great job, but lacked some coordination. Now things are improving.
This is the mobile web interface of #littleFedi. It can also be installed as a PWA, with push notifications.
@EnigmaRotor@bsd.cafe @@stefano@rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it yes, there’s definitely something that recently broke the picture attach. I’ll check tomorrow. Thank you!
Waiting for the pizza…