📣 #admins out there: do you have any suggestions for #relays with properly curated list of #instances?
What I am looking for:
- Relays that won't go offline within a few weeks. As a new instance admin experimenting with relays, I've noticed that 80% of the URLs reported on search engines are no longer online.
- Relays that have some minimal bar for instances that are allowed to join. When joining a relay results in your federated timeline being soon polluted by an endless stream of spam or porn (and that's the case for 90% of the relays on https://the-federation.info/activityrelay), relaying instances removes value instead of adding it.
- Ideally, I'd like relays that curate instances by topics (e.g. technology, physics, maths etc.), so we end up with federated timelines easily built around shared interests. In my mind, a relay should be more like a curate OPML aggregator of feeds rather than a chaotic network where everyone can join. The alternatives (having to either start from scratch and follow individual accounts, or join a relay that pumps 10 messages per second) are arguably both worse.
- The relays should have a reasonable amount of traffic. I run my instance on a VPS with limited database storage. A throughput of tens of posts per minute is both distracting and detrimental for the instance storage.
If I'm asking too much I'm keen to start a new relay instance with such features, but if similar relays already exist it'd save me a lot in terms of time and resources.