@star i host one, there are quite a lot of instances connected to it, including plasmatrap, and, to be completely honest, i fail to notice any difference
@star@link the main difference is that you essentially establish a bidirectional relationship with an entire instance if you're part of the same relay Otherwise, you'd only get posts from people that you follow
on smaller instances that's a meaningless distinction because you probably already follow all the users; with larger ones, you get substantially more content, and most profiles you encounter won't be fully empty
@privateger@link interesting! thank you! :) would it make a functional difference if i had a dummy account on my instance which just follows 1 account from all the instances i am interested in, vs. using a relay for this? i know that, internally, it would definitely make a difference, but i mean purely functionally :3
@star@link you are describing basically exactly what the "proxy" account in misskey does (following users added to lists, but that don't have a follow relationship with anyone on the server)
mind that following one user doesn't mean you get all posts from an instance; you'd only get the posts from that user. ActivityPub is pretty conservative in terms of who gets sent what posts
relays are a special case, and they do increase load because of how many posts tend to get forwarded/received
@star depends, really. they broadcast all posts they receive to all their subscribers when they're posted. this can be good (more activity) or bad (you're bound to remote instance moderation to be proactive more than you otherwise would be)
they were pretty important back when software didn't expose reply collections and didn't do reply backfill, but with that i don't really see that much of a use for them. though they can still be useful if you're following hashtags (shrimpnet does not support this yet though) or have a client with some kind of live refreshing keyword search going on
@star can also be useful if you're posting to hashtags as well, as without a relay they'd only get sent to instances you have at least one follower from
relays are useful especially for small instances as it basically gives a small instance access to all the connections the relay has done already; It forwards any posts you make to the relay and as such to anyone else that is subscribed to the relay, and vice-versa
They require you to have all your requests signed, but this should be the IS.NET default.
This means it can either be used to better connect with communities outside, or get more content inside (i.e by using https://relay.fedi.buzz/ to ingest a buncha hashtags)
flori_ava_star:~
@star@amazonawaws.com
@link@js.meowingwo.men
@privateger@plasmatrap.com
