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Solarbird 
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.
Erotic Mythology 🌹@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?
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?
@AimeeMaroux @MastodonEngineering They're calling it "scraping" which is... what they're calling it. >:/
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.