How to Build a Custom Mastodon Relay With Activity-Relay Project

Mastodon relays let instances share public posts from one server to many others without each server manually following every user. Without a relay, each instance admin must subscribe to remote users individually, which becomes impractical as the federation grows. The Activity-Relay project provides an open-source, self-hosted solution that acts as a central hub for forwarding … Read more

Mastodon Relay Topic Filtering: How to Subscribe Only to Tags

Mastodon relays forward public posts from one instance to many others. Without filtering, a relay sends everything including posts you do not want. This floods your federated timeline with irrelevant content. Mastodon relays support topic filtering through hashtag subscriptions. This article explains how relays work and how to subscribe only to specific tags so your … Read more

How to Use a Mastodon Relay to Bootstrap a New Single-User Instance

When you first set up a single-user Mastodon instance, the federated timeline is empty. Without existing followers or follows, the server receives almost no public posts from other instances. A Mastodon relay solves this by subscribing to a shared pool of public posts from participating servers. This article explains how to configure a relay on … Read more

How to Compare Mastodon Relay Throughput Across Providers

Mastodon relays distribute public posts from one server to many others. When you administer an instance, you need to know which relay provider delivers the most content without delays. Throughput — the volume of posts a relay can forward per minute — varies widely between providers. This article explains how to measure and compare relay … Read more

Mastodon Relay Behind Cloudflare: HTTP Signature Compatibility

When a Mastodon relay is placed behind Cloudflare, the relay often stops receiving posts from remote instances. The core cause is that Cloudflare’s reverse proxy strips or modifies the HTTP signature headers that Mastodon uses to verify incoming federated requests. Without these headers intact, the relay sees every incoming activity as unauthenticated and silently drops … Read more

How to Self-Host a Mastodon Relay on a Raspberry Pi

Mastodon relays are servers that forward public posts from one instance to many others, boosting federation visibility without manual follows. If your small Mastodon instance struggles to discover content from other servers, a relay can pull in posts automatically. This guide explains how to set up a Mastodon-compatible relay on a Raspberry Pi 4 or … Read more