friendica

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.

#activitypub #fediverse #friendica #mastodon #nodebb #relay #relayserver #relayservers

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.

@alan

Activity-Relay Server 2.5.0 RC 1 is now live at https://relay.argentwolf.org

Please help me out with connecting and testing! If you have any issues, please let me know! You can reach me at @alan, or open an issue on https://github.com/thystra/Activity-Relay

What’s new in Activity-Relay v2.5.0-rc1

• Adds relay-signed actor and object fetches for Mastodon authorized-fetch and secure-mode compatibility.
• Publishes the relay actor as an ActivityStreams Application, allowing current Friendica versions to discover and register the relay while preserving the existing actor ID, endpoints, and public key.
• Uses a shared, exact-authority HTTP-signature implementation for both authorized fetches and outbound delivery.
• Adds durable per-receiver delivery-health tracking through /status.json schema version 4.
• Adds an optional private observability listener for Prometheus metrics, process health, and Redis-backed readiness checks.
• Adds bounded Redis-backed operational metrics shared across the API and worker processes.
• Migrates asynchronous delivery to the maintained Redis-only Machinery v2 fork.
• Adds leased in-flight task claims and at-least-once recovery, preventing silent task loss after an abrupt worker or host failure. A duplicate delivery remains possible if the remote server accepts a request immediately before the worker terminates.
• Preserves the existing actor key, actor address, queue data, delayed retries, configuration names, and Redis database through the tested upgrade path.
• Includes extensive package, rollback, Redis-failure, worker-interruption, Mastodon, Friendica, NodeBB, container, race-test, and production validation.

Full RC changelog: Activity-Relay v2.5.0-rc1 changelog

Full release notes and downloads: Activity-Relay v2.5.0-rc1 release

Known limitation: NodeBB 4.14.2 may return HTTP 424 when it performs an unsigned follow-up fetch from an origin that requires signed GET requests. The relay-delivered request itself remains properly signed. (Bug Report)

If you find this project useful, please give it a star on GitHub! Any tips and/or support contributions are appreciated!

#activitypub #friendica #mastodon #fediverse #nodebb #relay #relayserver #relayservers

29 July 2026

Activity-Relay server 2.4.0 is released.
Github: https://github.com/thystra/Activity-Relay

Notable changes and features:

• Debian (.deb) and docker compose installation methods.
• Optional Caddy example reviewed from the idea in upstream PR 60, implemented as documentation rather than a runtime dependency.
• Standard actor outbox, followers, following, and shared-inbox metadata.
• Friendica and standards-style server-actor follow compatibility.
• NodeBB reciprocal follow, public-key, HTTP Host signing, and embedded Announce interoperability.
• Public connected, receiving, and publisher status information.
• Open signed publisher ingestion with policy enforcement.
• Bounded queue, fan-out, remote response, and concurrency controls.
• Multiple explicit daily-summary slots and resilient mail handling for reports to the server administrator.
• Configurable Cache size limits in the config.yml.
• Upgrade-safe optional website customization.
• Native package identity preservation and inactive-by-default services.

Changelog

Future roadmap

You can see a live install at: https://relay.argentwolf.org – Please try to connect and let me know of any issues!

If you have any issues, please let me know at alan@friendica.argentwolf.org, on github, or here!