Dear friends of the BSD Cafe,
One of the principles this place was built on has always been free communication. Whether on the Fediverse or on Matrix, the goal is the same: open, secure, private, decentralized tools. Because we know, from experience, that anything centralized will sooner or later come to an end.
Matrix is great, and we like it. But it's tied to its server - you can't migrate away (easily). It does its job well, yet sometimes it asks for more than a conversation should: heavy to host, hard to leave.
So when my friend @outofcreativity brought it up again at EuroBSDCon, I decided to give Delta Chat another try after many years. And yes - its philosophy fits mine, and the Cafe’s, well.

For a few months we ran a relay - a chatmail server - but it was on Debian, and I didn't want to make an official service that runs on Debian. Not because it doesn't work: it works perfectly. But because it wouldn't be in the spirit of this place.

Thanks to @feld 's excellent cookbook recipe, I also kept a private relay of my own running for months, just to test it. It held up beautifully. So yesterday, with the help of some friends in the cookbook chat, I migrated the Debian server to FreeBSD - accounts and data included - and I can finally call it a stable, official Cafe service.

Our chatmail relay - https://chatmail.bsd.cafe - runs on FreeBSD, in a jail. Which means it gets everything the other services get: hourly backups via zfs send and receive, FreeBSD's security, and all the rest.

I'd encourage everyone to try Delta Chat. Secure, decentralized communication built on protocols we already know and trust: the ones behind email. And the development is moving fast. Multi-relay is no longer a promise - it's here, and it's solid: a single profile can use several relays at once, so your account and your reachability survive even if one of them goes down and disappears. That's real resilience. The real decentralization, the one we love.

Because Signal is great. But Signal, too, is centralized. And we happen to like the true spirit of the Internet.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements #DeltaChat #ChatMail #Communication #OwnYourData

Dear friends of the BSD Cafe,
One of the principles this place was built on has always been free communication. Whether on the Fediverse or on Matrix, the goal is the same: open, secure, private, decentralized tools. Because we know, from experience, that anything centralized will sooner or later come to an end.
Matrix is great, and we like it. But it's tied to its server - you can't migrate away (easily). It does its job well, yet sometimes it asks for more than a conversation should: heavy to host, hard to leave.
So when my friend @outofcreativity brought it up again at EuroBSDCon, I decided to give Delta Chat another try after many years. And yes - its philosophy fits mine, and the Cafe’s, well.

For a few months we ran a relay - a chatmail server - but it was on Debian, and I didn't want to make an official service that runs on Debian. Not because it doesn't work: it works perfectly. But because it wouldn't be in the spirit of this place.

Thanks to @feld 's excellent cookbook recipe, I also kept a private relay of my own running for months, just to test it. It held up beautifully. So yesterday, with the help of some friends in the cookbook chat, I migrated the Debian server to FreeBSD - accounts and data included - and I can finally call it a stable, official Cafe service.

Our chatmail relay - https://chatmail.bsd.cafe - runs on FreeBSD, in a jail. Which means it gets everything the other services get: hourly backups via zfs send and receive, FreeBSD's security, and all the rest.

I'd encourage everyone to try Delta Chat. Secure, decentralized communication built on protocols we already know and trust: the ones behind email. And the development is moving fast. Multi-relay is no longer a promise - it's here, and it's solid: a single profile can use several relays at once, so your account and your reachability survive even if one of them goes down and disappears. That's real resilience. The real decentralization, the one we love.

Because Signal is great. But Signal, too, is centralized. And we happen to like the true spirit of the Internet.

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeAnnouncements #DeltaChat #ChatMail #Communication #OwnYourData

A new BSD Cafe service will be officially announced tomorrow morning (CEST)

It’s about communication, freedom and…powered by a BSD.

Stay tuned!

#StayTuned #BSDCafe #ComingSoon #OwnYourData

Aggressive caching for a Mastodon reverse proxy: what to cache, what to never cache, and why content negotiation will eventually betray you

The same URL serves HTML to browsers, JSON to apps, and ActivityPub to remote instances. Here's how I cache Mastodon with nginx without betraying any of them.

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2026/06/05/aggressive_caching_for_a_mastodon_reverse_proxy/

#ITNotes #nginx #Caching #IT #SysAdmin #Mastodon #Fediverse #BSDCafe

# barista-update -r 42.42-RELEASE upgrade

coffee component not installed, skipped (already in the cup)
Looking up bsd.cafe mirrors... 1 mirror found (it's always the same counter).
Fetching metadata signature for 42.42-RELEASE from bsd.cafe... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting barista... too much hair found, skipped.
Preparing to download files (and tiramisu)... done.

The following components of barista seem to be installed:
patience/base listening/world caffeine/generic
sarcasm/light long-term-memory/dbg

The following components of barista do not seem to be installed:
diplomacy/lib32 vacation/base regular-sleep/lib32-dbg head/hair

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

The following components of barista will be upgraded:
patience -> patience-42.42 (improved handling of difficult spam bots)
caffeine -> caffeine-42.42 (new backend: ZFS - Zero Faulty Sips)
listening -> listening-42.42 (now supports silences too, but being Italian it will be hard)

WARNING: This barista is running a custom kernel ("stubborn"), which is
not a configuration distributed as part of BSD Cafe. Proceeding anyway, as always.

To install the downloaded upgrades, run "barista-upgrade install"
and please offer the administrator a coffee.

#BSDCafe #Jokes

The #BSDCafe #Mastodon instances have been updated to v4.5.11

#BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates

Good morning, #BSDCafe
Good morning, #illumosCafe
Good morning, #Fediverse

Have a great Friday!

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=js-refresh&__goaway_id=bcf71f11bbb5dba21cfbac5bbd8f44c5&__goaway_referer=https%3A%2F%2Finv.nadeko.net%2F&v=a4qp80yIi7g

#Music #MastoMusic #MastoRadio #FediMusic #FediRadio #JukeBox

New wave of bot registrations on both the Mastodon and NodeBB (billboard) instances.

In these cases, unfortunately, a few incorrect approvals or denials might slip through.

But surely Svetlana, who wants to sign up because the community might appreciate her erotic content, isn't exactly what BSD Cafe is about.

Maybe she confused the BSDs with BDSM (thanks @oxy for pointing it out)

#BSDCafe

Can you guess what time I enabled Anubis in front of Forgejo?

#BSDCafe #Anubis #Forgejo #Bots #NoBot #Scrapers

As #Brew (#Forgejo) is being hit by scrapers, slowing down the entire server, I just added #Anubis in front of it.

Let me know if you find any issues.

@stefano

#BSDCafe #BSDCafeServices #BSDCafeUpdates