Fediverse relays have historically been a bit of a dodgy undertaking. In the past, when I’ve tested a relay, it was a largely unmoderated firehose of random stuff from the network. Unmoderated fedi is often particularly unpleasant; so much so that I could never really stomach it for more than a few days.

But I recently discovered relay.fedi.buzz, which provides relay endpoints for specific hashtags or instances. This is a far different proposition than the usual relay firehose: it’s much more manageable and customizable. From my initial testing, it seems that hashtag-based relay endpoints are useful for specific, niche tags. Popular tags have a predictable amount of spam, so that they’re not particularly interesting to follow. But a relay for an infrequently used hashtag is super useful.

Additionally, relay endpoints for specific instances are a good way to get more content from the parts of the fedi that you actually like.

So overall, relay.fedi.buzz seems useful, and I’m going to work on tweaking the endpoints I follow to see if I can get a reasonably good mix from it. The code for the project is also on GitHub and AGPL licensed, which is nice.

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