Mezzo

Mezzo is an open-source, privacy-focused front-end for Tenor that allows you to browse and view GIFs without Google's tracking and advertising systems.

Click to see screenshots

Showcase of the GIF view page

Showcase of the user profile page

Showcase of the search page

Instances

For public instances of Mezzo, see mezzo-instances.

Run your own instance

With Docker/Podman

We have pre-built images you can run.

To run the latest stable version of Mezzo (recommended):

docker run -p8006:8006 gitfield.org/fsky/mezzo:latest

To run the canary (unstable) version of Mezzo built from the latest Git commit:

docker run -p8006:8006 gitfield.org/fsky/mezzo:canary

If you are using Podman, the process is the same. Just replace docker with podman in the command.

Compose

You can find a compose file in contrib/compose/compose.yaml. Simply download it and run:

docker compose up -d

Quadlet

You can find a Quadlet file in contrib/quadlet/mezzo.container. Download it and place it into ~/.config/containers/systemd/ or /etc/containers/systemd/. After that, run:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start mezzo.service

From a binary

Binaries are provided for Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Illumos for amd64, arm64, and i386. You can download them from the releases page.

Once downloaded, run the binary directly. On Unix-like systems you may need to mark it as executable first:

chmod +x mezzo

Linux packages

Linux packages are also published for Debian/Ubuntu (.deb), RPM-based distributions (.rpm), and Arch Linux (.pkg.tar.zst).

The packages install:

• the mezzo binary into /usr/bin
• a systemd service unit
• a distro-appropriate environment file: /etc/default/mezzo on Debian /etc/sysconfig/mezzo on RPM-based systems /etc/conf.d/mezzo on Arch Linux

After installation, edit the environment file if needed, then enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable --now mezzo

Running with systemd or other service managers

For systemd, you can find an example service file in contrib/systemd/mezzo.service.

For OpenRC, you can find an example service script and configuration file in contrib/openrc/.

Build from source

This program is written in Go. You need Go 1.25 or later.

You can build a binary using:

go build -o mezzo ./cmd/mezzo

Configuration

The application can be configured using the following environment variables:

Variable	Required	Default	Description
MEZZO_PORT	No	8006	Port to run on.
MEZZO_PATCHES_URL	No		Link to any patches that were applied. Only set this if your instance runs modified source code.
MEZZO_CACHE_DISABLED	No	false	Disable in-memory caching entirely.
MEZZO_CACHE_GIF_TTL	No	1h	How long to cache GIF page metadata. Accepts Go duration strings (e.g. 30m, 2h).
MEZZO_CACHE_GIF_MAX	No	1000	Maximum number of GIF pages to keep in cache.
MEZZO_CACHE_SEARCH_TTL	No	10m	How long to cache search results. Accepts Go duration strings.
MEZZO_CACHE_SEARCH_MAX	No	500	Maximum number of search result pages to keep in cache.
MEZZO_CACHE_PROFILE_TTL	No	30m	How long to cache user profile pages. Accepts Go duration strings.
MEZZO_CACHE_PROFILE_MAX	No	200	Maximum number of user profiles to keep in cache.

Note

For backward compatibility, PORT and PATCHES_URL (without the MEZZO_ prefix) are still accepted as fallbacks.

License

Copyright © 2026-present FSKY. This software is distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license.