Relay servers for public posts

Federation
1

After a break of a few years, I’m back on Diaspora.
Everything works perfectly, as usual :grinning:

However, what I miss, or just haven’t found, are active relays.

Are none currently active?

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Welcome back!

Support for relays has been removed from the current develop sources and will not come back. There are a couple of old threads that you’ll be able to find with the search here, but the summary is that relays for post data are fundamentally a bad idea, because

  • they create a somewhat centralized point of failure and will cut off small pods if the relay goes down
  • have an inherent cost of maintenance - running server-apps is never free
  • are a central point for abuse - i.e. it’s easy for a spambot to deliver spam-posts to relay and get free reach
  • can DoS smaller pods with “too much content”, and fills up the databases of small pods with posts they’ll never see anyway

and while some of those issues can be worked around with a clever implementation, not all issues can be resolved. Unfortunately, “how to discover remote contents in a federated social network without relying on a central entity” is still an unresolved theoretical problem.

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Thank you for the quick answer.

"There are a couple of old threads that you’ll be able to find with the search here … "

That’s what I was referring to, and I think I can remember that I had integrated a relay some years ago.

Also, as far as I remember, the only downside is the limited search for hashtags; the federation also works in the public part without any problems.

Thanks again for the quick reply, and keep on with this good job.

I believe that diaspora*, as a real alternative, could perhaps experience a revival due to the rush to other platforms.

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