The Relay Feed

If you see a Relay Feed in the menu, this server subscribes to a relay - a shared firehose that carries public posts between servers that have all joined it. It is how a small site sees anything from the wider Fediverse before its members have found people to follow: normally a server only receives what someone here already follows, which leaves a new site very quiet.

It is deliberately kept apart from your other feeds. Nobody here chose these posts or follows the people who wrote them - it is simply everything those servers published - so it never mixes into the main feed or your Friends Feed. You open it when you feel like browsing, and it leaves you alone otherwise.

Only a recent window of it is kept. A post that scrolls out of that window drops out of the feed too, unless you did something with it - replied, liked, bookmarked, reposted, pinned, or reported it - in which case it stays.

You can reply to, like and report anything in it the same as any other post, and if you find someone worth keeping up with you can follow them - their posts then arrive in your Friends Feed like anyone else's, whether or not the relay is still subscribed.

Only the administrator decides whether this server uses a relay at all. If there is no Relay Feed in your menu, this one does not.