Connecting the Dots in the Fediverse

About The Client

A high-traffic Mastodon server dedicated to news and journalism hosts tens of thousands of reporters, editors, and news followers. Its mission is to keep the news conversation open, real-time, and civil while safeguarding user privacy and editorial standards.

Client Spotlight: High-Traffic Mastodon Journalism Server

As the Fediverse grew, the client’s local and federated timelines became increasingly siloed. Users wanted broader perspectives and timely conversations across platforms, yet opening every federation tap risked overwhelming moderators with spam, misinformation, and duplicate content.

To move forward, the instance needed to expand its reach to high-quality conversations beyond its immediate network, maintain reliability and speed during traffic surges, and preserve editorial integrity through granular moderation controls.

What We Did

Honeytree built BigRelay.social—a high-performance ActivityPub relay written in Go that seamlessly federates the client’s server with the wider decentralized network.

The relay forwards every public post from the instance to subscribed servers and returns public traffic from those servers just as efficiently, delivering real-time reach without added strain. .

A streamlined, web-based control panel gives administrators full oversight of subscriptions, traffic, and policy enforcement, while upcoming enhancements will introduce even deeper moderation capabilities.

The Results

Onboarding sped up dramatically: new communities land on an instance whose global timeline is already buzzing, so they feel at home from the first refresh. Cross-platform discovery surged as the relay surfaced compelling accounts in multiple languages, broadening conversations without extra effort. Administrators gained breathing room because one relay URL now replaces the tedious upkeep of manual allow-lists, yet control remains firmly in their hands—if a relay ever grows noisy, problematic, it can be easily detached, instantly.