Many register on Mastodon.social to join the #fediverse. It is perceived as the easy choice allowing wider reach.
People tend to overthink the choice of their home #Mastodon instance, but there's some truth to the worries. From a small instance, it might be harder to reach an audience scattered on many other small instances. Often you rely on a pre-existing network of contacts, either on or off-fediverse, to boost or follow you. (#Introductions can help.)
It doesn't have to be that way. #ActivityPub relays can be used to make sure that all users in participating instances can reach each other's federated timeline. For visibility it's the equivalent of a mega-instance.
Individual instances can still moderate independently, but there are trade-offs. Seeing more content from other instances increases the chances you won't like something; trends become more homogeneous (and may require more curation if you don't like that).
@nemobis how do you use these relays?
@gubi Go to your Mastodon instance's /admin/relays page and add the relay's /inbox URL, e.g. https://relay.101010.pl/inbox
There’s an invite-only relay run by @aussocialadmin specifically to connect Australian instances. ausglam.space is connected, it seems to work well.
Having said that, I have Trends turned off on ausglam.space because it’s just not very useful for us and I don’t have time to whitelist things. Originally pretty much every trending hashtag was porn related, which was exceedingly boring.
@hugh @mark @aussocialadmin Interesting, I didn't know about the Australian experience! Very nice to hear.
I think I've never seen any porn hashtags but I can imagine how some instances can overwhelm trends that way...
It’s probably no longer an issue but when the functionality first was introduced I think there may have been a bit of deliberate gaming of it. My instance is much smaller than the others on the relay, which are open-registration.
@pierobosio Thanks for trying. I understand. Did you feel a few instances in particular were problematic (in which case it could be enough to silence/suspend them)?
No, I don't like to suspend instances. The main problem is that most of the posts are in languages other than English and Italian.
@pierobosio Ah! And they were incorrectly marked as being in English, so that filtering them in one's preferences doesn't work? Hopefully that will get better since per-toot language selection is now possible in v3.5.3 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17073 .
@nemobis
Yes, however, I want to keep my instance open to each language, if i need to follow a German account, for example.
@pierobosio Maybe it will be better now: https://respublicae.eu/@praetor/108736336529813155 . Took me a few hours of work. 😓
Well, That's good.
Europe has been able to make the single euro coin, but has not yet managed to make a single language.
@nemobis An important thing to know for admins is that on a small instance it significantly affect resource usage since you're suddenly federating much more.
@nemobis And you probably won't gain anything in relation to "instances closest to you", since you're already federating with them.
@jaranta Dunno. The mere fact two #Mastodon instances know about each other doesn't mean that they know everything about each other. If nobody on my instance interacted with an account on yours, I will not find it by a string search. If nobody follows it, I won't see (almost) any posts when I check the account locally (or search by hashtag).
On https://mastodontti.fi/tags/helsinki there are two posts from the past 3 days, on https://mamot.fr/tags/Helsinki only one because https://mastodontti.fi/@muto/108716399035992399 has no followers.
@nemobis Hmm. I thought federation was handled on the server level, but this sounds more like its a account level thing. I guess I was misinformed.
@jaranta I'm not quite sure I fully understand it either. I've not studied the source code much. https://decrypt.fail/mastodon-on-the-fediverse-current-limitations by @blog got me started, the rest I learnt by observation on /admin/accounts, /admin/instances, /tags.
@jaranta Indeed. Relays had a significant impact on the #ResPublicae sidekiq queue when it was on a shared server (especially if the relay happened to contain Poast). Now that it's on a decently sized VM, I barely notice a difference.
@jaranta When I looked into the slow jobs, often it was due to half-broken instances which caused my instance to wait forever on HTTP requests to cache things. A relay can help by excluding such instances automatically until they recover. https://relay.101010.pl/ seems to do so. (Not sure whether this feature is in master upstream.)
The most commonly used relay is https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/relay and there are several known instances https://github.com/brodi1/activitypub-relays .
So far, the only relay I found to be working transparently and reliably is https://relay.101010.pl/ by @xaphanpl. (Thanks!)
If you're a #MastoAdmin, consider joining or running your own (for the instances closest to you).