Adding Relay Instances
Sam Whited
Public
Seen by 193
Hi all,
I recently posted a poll about some smaller instances that invited us to join their network of relays. I was surprised to find that the poll overwhelmingly voted negative, and while I respect that this is the community position I was also surprised that Loomio polls didn't really allow for discussion, and I think the majority of the comments left were people who didn't understand what relays were (my mistake!), or focused on a specific aspect of the community that asked us to join which I mentioned off handedly, but wasn't that important. I wanted to open up discussion on the issue and see if others felt differently or if it's just me who thinks this is an important act of solidarity on the fediverse!
First, here's what the admin page says about relays:
A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers.
The network in question included several small, new instances mostly aligned around love of bicycles, green transport, and cities. However, the network was not specifically targeting those topics, instead it was trying to expand its timeline to give its users a broad set of interests for them to discover and they thought the values and posters on our instance would be a good fit. Someone commented in the vote that since we'd be the biggest instance we'd be increasing their database size disproportionately, and to be clear, this is true, but they invited us and are aware, the idea is that this gives their users an easier way to discover content they like.
I also saw a few comments that said they didn't necessarily want our federated timeline swamped with bicycle content, however these instances are a lot smaller than us so the converse of the previous point is also true: from our instances perspective nothing really changes since users of this instance are likely already following users from those instances and many (if not all) of the posts are likely showing up in the federated timeline already. For now, as the biggest instance, we'd mostly just be helping populate their timeline.
Another voter in the poll mentioned that they wouldn't be comfortable joining relays unless it was clear how other members are chosen, which is absolutely fair! In this case, members are chosen only if all servers on the relay vote to add the instance, so for our vote we could start a poll or find some other process.
In general I think relaying with smaller instances is a good way to help them get started. It helps users not think that mastodon is "boring" because their instance doesn't have much content on it and it helps us in our mission to support building a kinder social network. I'm not necessarily asking us to re-consider the poll right now, just for a bit of discussion: am I right here, or totally wrong? How do we feel about joining relays in the future?
Sam Whited Mon 19 Dec 2022 11:54AM
The space usage will be negligible for us. The other servers are mostly tiny, so the federated tab for them will be mostly empty; relaying is more of a service for them so that they can discover more users on social.coop and the other aligned instances in the relay. From our side it would also be more posts that can be searched (eg. when searching for a hash tag you'll see some of the posts, making search more useful).
Dynamic Mon 19 Dec 2022 1:48AM
Is it only the posts on those servers that would show up on our federated timeline, or also the posts on servers that they federate with? If the latter, what is the forward-looking governance plan if members of the network have disagreements over which servers to federate with?
I also wonder about network governance (or lack thereof) for behavior norms within the servers in the network. How are we affected if servers in the network have more permissive or less permissive norms than we do?
Sam Whited Mon 19 Dec 2022 11:55AM
It's just their posts, if I understand this correctly. The relay that reached out to us is more or less co-operative, one <relay instance>, one vote in terms of governance.
Dynamic Mon 19 Dec 2022 1:16PM
Thanks for this information.
Does "one relay instance, one vote" mean that social.coop would get one vote, but that network instances that have 10 members would also get one vote? What would the process of voting look like? Would members of social.coop need to vote on what social.coop's vote would be, or would we have some sort of representative who would aggregate votes and vote on our behalf?
There are a lot of social details that I think have so far been left unspecified.
Sam Whited Tue 20 Dec 2022 12:37PM
yes, each of the relays would get one vote. I don't think we really need to hash out every tiny bit of how things are going to work before we decide if we wanted to join a relay, personally. One of the existing teams could take on the work, or we could designate someone to be a representative of social.coop to the relay. It's not a huge thing with extensive governance needs, and we could always pull out later.
Dynamic Mon 19 Dec 2022 1:53AM
I think it's worth noting here that most servers are run by one person or a small handful of people who have full decision-making power to define policy. That isn't the case for us, so if policy disagreements come up between us and another member of the network, it wouldn't be a simple matter of getting the admins together in a room to hash things out; we'd need a meta-level democratic process, and I want to know what that would look like.
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Drew Harry Mon 19 Dec 2022 6:47AM
I'm still not fully understanding the implications of relaying. The wiki on the topic doesn't seem to have much detail. I think what happens when you connect to a relay is the following:
Toots from any member of the relay are added to our federated timeline.
When you search for something, it will search any instance connected to the relay as well.
And then one other wrinkle -- the other way another instance gets federated to our instance is that someone on our instance tries to follow someone on an unfederated instance. That causes our instances to federate, as well. An admin could undo that federation. But we default to allow any user to create a new federation link.
What I don't get is how a relay is different from the admins on any other instance just choosing to federate with us proactively? Is it that if you share a relay ALL toots from all member instances appear on all federated timelines, but if I follow someone on another instance only the toots from accounts I follow appear?
The whole thing seems weird to me. Our federated timeline is nearly useless to me at its current volume. I tip into it occasionally and adding some small instances is in fine with me; I doubt I'd notice.
Maybe if I were on an instance with 50 people I would find it a lot more valuable because their federated timeline would look a lot more like our local timeline. And maybe that's actually what they're asking, practically? To which I would say "this effects you a lot more than me and if you are interested, then sure!"
Sam Whited Mon 19 Dec 2022 11:57AM
If I follow someone on another instance we don't get that whole instances timeline to be searchable/in the federated timeline, just the person I followed. Relays pro-actively send all posts on that server so that they show up in the federated timeline/can be searched. For smaller instances (ie. not us, but the other ones in the relay) this makes their federated timeline actually useful for discovering new people and helps them get bootstrapped.
Shou · Mon 19 Dec 2022 1:08AM
I think my main question is: is relaying even useful? As I understand it, posts appear in the Federated tab, which is extremely noisy and basically useless, and media/posts/likes/follows are synchronised better at the expense of higher server load/more space usage? If there's more to it I'm missing, please do tell, because I'm not seeing much benefit as it is
During the vote, I think I specified that I'm not so much against the idea of joining forces with them even if they're not specifically coop related, because they align somewhat with our values anyway. I'm happy to associate with climate change/biking/urban planning related instances, but I think we should do it in a more meaningful way.