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?
Josh Levy Mon 19 Dec 2022 3:10PM
I think it's a great idea to allow other trusted servers to add us as a relay. From my understanding I don't think it causes any harm to us, as it just allows them access to more of the fediverse. I ran my own server for a bit and the lack of relays really hampers the experience. It's hard to find anything via search because hashtags aren't populated, you don't get insight into favorites or boosts on posts because your server doesn't know about them, your federated feed is only your follows, etc. It feels pretty isolated.
Dynamic Mon 19 Dec 2022 5:25PM
I wonder if there might be value in combining joining a relay network with switching to a fork of the Mastodon codebase that includes a privacy option for "Local" posting. The relay would make our public posts visible to more people. If this is a concern for anyone (and honestly, I don't know if it is, just trying out scenarios here) then local posting would continue to allow a posting option that's more public than "Followers Only" but less public than "Public."
Ana Ulin Tue 20 Dec 2022 4:31AM
I am supportive of the spirit of acting as a relay for new, small, aligned instances, as a way to help them get more content into their federated timelines (the impact on our own federated timeline will be negligible, as I understand it).
If/when we do want to act as a relay, in addition to the community chiming in on alignment with the instances we'd relay to, I'd like to see TWG weigh in on any additional burdens on our infrastructure, and the CWG weigh in on the suitability of the proposed instances (at least do some due diligence on #fediblock).
Zee Spencer Wed 21 Dec 2022 5:51PM
I am hesitant to offer this as a service to the community, as I would prefer there were some expectation of reciprocity. Perhaps what we want to do here is write a Relay Policy which allows Members to request Social.Coop serve as a relay, with clear guidance for how relays are added/re-evaluated/dropped.
I'm also in favor of the policy being "Relays are added only with x% of members voting, and y% approving plus a certification from the TWG that a particular relay is safe-to-add" (or an even smaller policy if it can be done)
@[email protected] Wed 21 Dec 2022 8:28PM
I would be totally FOR relay for other democratically-run instance if they're bigger than a certain number of active users (like > 10 or > 100). If not, we risk accidentally propping up structures that run counter to our goals.
Sam Whited Fri 23 Dec 2022 12:22PM
What sort of structures are you talking about here?
@[email protected] Fri 23 Dec 2022 2:30PM
Nothing extremist, but non-coop structures. If we want social.coop to survive, we have to have new people coming in to replace those that leave or become inactive, and to do that people have to know coop model is possible and can work just as good as benevolent dictator.
Sam Whited Fri 23 Dec 2022 2:33PM
Personally, I disagree. We should absolutely be encouraging the co-op model, but that doesn't mean not interacting with any other non-co-op folks. Small instances that do good things might use different models, that doesn't mean we shouldn't show solidarity.
@[email protected] Fri 23 Dec 2022 2:35PM
I was too strong on my first statement - but if the users of the other models see the coop model as viable but not for them (right now, or ever), that's fine since for them it's still a real thing, just not something they're into. I'm more running into people thinking that a coop model is a fantasy or fake.
mike_hales · Mon 19 Dec 2022 11:30AM
A 'relays timeline' like @Matt Noyes mentioned sounds good to me. I never look at the Local (social.coop) feed, let alone the Fed feed, and only sometimes at my home feed (followed folks) which is pretty diverse, when I have time to browse. Notifications/@mentions is my primary window: my Mastodon is pretty much peer-to-recognised-peer. But it would be good to have a 'fresh voices' feed, of affiliated instances/relays.
Helping small instances achieve diversity and range sounds good too.