Exactly one year ago, on 30th December 2024, I laid the foundation of FediMeteo.
I took a VM, installed FreeBSD, and set up the first jail to support Italy. The goal was to create a tool for my own use, support a few countries, and announce it.
Unexpectedly, the enthusiasm was incredible. That pushed me to keep going, support more countries and cities, and turn it into what it is today.
FediMeteo now supports 38 countries and 2,937 cities, with more than 7,700 followers in the Fediverse alone, not counting the many people who follow via RSS feeds or visit the web pages.
If you are curious to read the story and some technical details, you can find it here:
https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands/
Today is also Tuesday, a #ThankYouTuesday, so I want to say thanks to:
* OpenMeteo - @openmeteo - for providing accurate, high quality data, without which FediMeteo would be far less useful
* @grunfink - creator of snac, who made all of this possible using very few resources, on a 4 euro per month VM
* FreeBSD, which thanks to the efficiency of the OS and its jail implementation made it possible to run this service in a stable and efficient way with minimal effort
* FediFollows - @FediFollows - that periodically spreads the word about cities, countries, and the enthusiasm around the project
*All of you*, who suggested, encouraged, corrected, and celebrated this project
And forward toward supporting more countries and other interesting features already in the works.
Happy birthday, FediMeteo! 🎉
#FediMeteo #HappyBirthday #Meteo #Weather #FreeBSD #snac #snac2 #OpenMeteo #Fediverse
FediMeteo now covers Indonesia
FediMeteo is expanding again. Indonesia is now covered, with dedicated Fediverse weather accounts for cities and places across the country.FediMeteo kini mencakup Indonesia
FediMeteo kembali berkembang. Indonesia kini telah masuk dalam cakupan FediMeteo, dengan akun cuaca Fediverse khusus untuk kota-kota dan berbagai tempat di seluruh negeri.Covered cities / Kota yang dicakup
Jakarta - @jakartaHere is the CPU usage graph for the last 24 hours of the FediMeteo VM. A full 24 hours, during which a huge number of people are connecting, helped by the traction gained from being among the top stories on Hacker News and Lobsters, as well as the many shares across the Fediverse.
RAM usage? Active, around 450 MB. Then there is cache, ARC, and so on. But in practice, zero swap in use after days of uptime.
39 jails running, 39 snac instances, nginx serving the homepage, and HAProxy. HAProxy caching enabled. ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes, backups via zfs send and receive every hour. The same hourly schedule applies to the recalculation of cities, countries, and followers for the homepage.
All of this on a 4 euro per month FreeBSD VM.
If anyone has doubts about the quality and efficiency of FreeBSD, this is the data to show.
Some results for city coordinates were not fully accurate, and forecasts were referring to the center of the administrative area rather than the actual city center. This also affected my own city, with a shift of about 30 km. I have revised the coordinate calculation process and, starting from the next update, the reference point will be the center of the target city. I actually discovered this while implementing the last item on this list...
In addition to wind speed, FediMeteo will now include an arrow showing wind direction. The direction will also be reported as a value in degrees. This feature has been requested several times in the past, and I think the time has come to introduce it.
New data added: AQI, the Air Quality Index. Using different indices for each local context would have been complicated, and reporting them all would have made the output unnecessarily complex. For this reason, I chose to use the American AQI for all cities, with a visual indicator to quickly understand the situation at a glance. This is consistent with major weather apps and allows for proper comparisons between different cities. PM2.5 and PM10 values are also included.
I hope these new features will be useful and… let’s keep moving forward!extreme feels-like temperatures, hot or cold
high UV levels
poor air quality
thunderstorms
heavy rain likely
strong winds or gusts
