Hey server admins!
Do you run a small server and you wish it had a wider view of the Fediverse, with more results from searches? You might want to try using relays:
If general relays take up too many resources, try using a more specific topic or instance relay feed from FediBuzz:
@feditips I've only had a negative experience with relays, when this instance first came about 6 months ago the relays that did exist only gave me headache with unmoderated content, or spotty uptime. Is there any real difference between engaging with posts manually to gain connections, vs using a relay? It's possible the available relays are more maintained but the general thoughts I've heard on them are 50/50 split on good vs bad. Interested to hear if you've got any info/perspective on this
Have you tried the more specific relays rather than general relays?
Also yes, as I mention in the article you do need to choose relays carefully.
Manual can work too, the main advantage of relays is speeding the process up.
@feditips I ended up not trying for specific relays then, as I couldn't really find any that were online, or accepting new servers. I just engaged naturally and slowly but surely as some new folks joined, the connections count grew and such. Certainly took time, but in some ways I think the natural growth helped more, it created a community, and a more "curated" federated feed for lack of a better term haha. If there are some specific relays I may take a look, just need to make sure I check out the participating servers first. Thanks for the info, seems a good bit has changed in the past several months as far as relays go!
@feditips note to self don't relay with use relay.fedi.buzz to relay with mastodon.social you will get way to many messages.
@feditips
Individuals can also use the fedi buzz relay links as accounts to follow, if they want a wider view of things without needing to rely on admins to add the relays!
@feditips wow this is a great time! Going to follow the #NewJersey tag for our local instance and see how it goes!
@feditips hey @mastohost is this something we can do on your plans?
@feditips I'm slightly confused as to how the FediBuzz relay(s) work. I subscribed our server to the "philly" tag, and then made a post using the philly tag. My own post was then boosted into my timeline by FediBuzz.
I don't think normal relays work this way, do they? Why is FediBuzz boosting stuff? Seems a little noisy.
I've sent a message to the developer to ask about this.
Hey there, just got a reply from the developer:
"I just added not relaying back posts to the originating instance."
@feditips Thank you for your help! I guess I could have filed a bug.
I just don't quite understand how relays in general work or how FediBuzz works in particular. Are people on other servers that use FediBuzz seeing any posts from the relay as boosts from FediBuzz? Are all relays like that?
Traditionally relays are much more indiscriminate, pushing posts that are visible to their server to other servers which subscribe to their relay.
FediBuzz is newer and much more specific.
I think the idea is that it's feeding specific content to you as boosts, because boosts are one of the things that make a server notice posts.
Other people on your server will then be able to discover that post through hashtag searches etc, regardless of how your server ended up noticing it.
@feditips OK, I think I'm starting to understand. So I am seeing this boost because I follow the #philly hashtag, but users on my server who don't subscribe to the hashtag won't get a notification about the boost?
With a traditional relay, what would happen if I subscribed to the Philly hashtag, and someone on another server posted about it? Would it just appear in my Home feed, without any sign that it came from a relay? How do traditional relays make servers notice posts?
I am not a sysadmin but as far as I know relays simply feed into the server's list of noticed posts, alongside posts it has noticed by other methods (user subscriptions, user shares, shares by people the user follows etc).
Hashtag subscriptions don't boost anything, they're just passive filters for posts your server notices anyway.
The hashtag based relay which you've subscribed to is something else, it's an account that actively pushes posts to your server by boosting them.
@skyfaller @feditips So I know this is old news now, but as you know if you use the Relays admin console to add a tag w/ Fedibuzz, it will show up in the instance's federated feed.
But if you want to be more personal, you (or your users) can add any tag as a followed user, like @tag-philly to individually subscribe to the wider Fediverse's philly power.