I am pleased to announce that Activity Relay 3.0 and Activity Relay Directory 1.0 are released! This brings a conclusion to this passion project. I’ve been dabbling in the Fediverse for a while, and have, for some years, wanted to run my own relay. Of course, there were never very many good relay packages, and of what there were, were incomplete or incompatible with Friendica (or WordPress!, which was what I wanted to use as my platform of choice.
You can get them here:
https://github.com/thystra/Activity-Relay
Operational Example: https://relay.argentwolf.org
https://github.com/thystra/activity-relay-directory
Operational Example: https://directory.argentwolf.org
So, now having access to AI, I forked the Yukimochi Activity Relay and spent some time directing AI to fix and modernize the Relay software. 3.0 now supports RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures and RFC 9530 Digest Fields – a big thanks to @julian for turning me onto that. A docker image and a .deb package is provided. An optional front end website is also part of it, which can be disabled or otherwise configured with your own custom front end for the statistics.
The most significant addition to this is the link to Activity Relay Directory (ARD). Once I had my relay server up and running, I wanted to advertise it. I messaged the 4 or 5 current list of relays that I could find. I never heard back from any of them, if they even had a way to message them. So how does one advertise a Relay? Thus, the Directory was born.
Relay operators can opt in to have their Relay auto report to a Directory and indicate that it is up. Directory operators can set their Directory to open or closed, and no manual intervention is required. An example can be seen at https://directory.argentwolf.org. Other Relay implementations can use the Protocol to talk to the Directory Server as well.
I am also committing to maintain a list where Relay operators can find other Directories to list their Relay in.
Of course, as the human in charge, all faults are mine. So if there is an issue, please log a bug against the appropriate package. If you have an instance, I’d love to see you connect to the relay. If you host a Relay, please try the directory server.
This was something I’ve wanted for a while, and I’m happy to give back to the Fediverse community.
