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Breaking relay.fedi.buzz - particularly with ZERO notice - is a crushing negative for hashtag games and follows on small instances. Ad hoc group activities like monsterdon and tcmparty and hashtaggames itself are largely possible on small instances because of hashtag relay services like fedi.buzz, and whole-instance relaying is not a solution for us.
(Imagine small instances trying to relay all of mastodon.social, come on. No.)
It’s also prohibitive against other uses on small instances like emergency tracking. If you want to try to do that, you’d better be on a big instance like mastodon.social.
This is a massive kneecapping and it’s going out without consideration or notice.
@moira@MastodonEngineering Oh no, that sucks! 😨
I recommended fedi.buzz in my guide to Mastodon, especially for niche creators and people on smaller instances.
I'm assuming it's a measure against crawling?
But yeah, it makes things much harder for creatives, it's breaking up small communities, it's making small instances much less able to participate in the ways I described. (Unless and until fedi.buzz implements around it, of course, which they could do various ways and pretty certainly will. And those ways aren't better.)
I have suggested that it should be left up until there is a replacement tool for this critical small-instance functionality, but I kind of doubt they're going to do that. I also suggested only exposing posts with hashtags, as hashtagged posts are clearly intended to be discovered, and this is discovery. So.
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