Relay good news

I'm finally joining the firehose club.

Introducing firehose.network - public infrastructure and tools for ATProto relays.

The initial release includes 3 public ATProto relays deployed globally: North America, Europe and Asia (new).

All are available for public use with a 72-hour backfill/replay window.

Check them out at:

northamerica.firehose.network

europe.firehose.network

asia.firehose.network

I've been experimenting with indigo relay setup and maintenance for a few months now.

Setup is straightforward but daily operations are where it gets interesting.

A few things I'm running to keep things healthy:

PDS discovery

A cron job pulls the PDS host list from the main bsky.network relay every few hours, diffs it against firehose.network 's relays, and adds anything missing.

PDS re-crawls

A script periodically checks for offline PDSes and sends requestCrawl to see if they've come back online.

Monitoring + Alerting

Email alerts for CPU, memory, disk space. Grafana dashboards for overall and per-relay metrics (alerting still WIP)

There's also a public status page .

(FYI, Asia relay is pretty new. Moved to a bigger dedicated server very recently)

What's next:

There are some early discussions on #relay-operators channel in ATProto Touchers Discord about making relay operations easier and have better insights, and a few tools are already built in this space.

My personal wishlist - either as a separate service / built in indigo itself

Auto PDS discovery + re-crawls

Expose per-PDS throttling metrics when event limits are exceeded (so I could setup alerts based on that)

PDS accounts browser in relay admin UI to easily help identify abuse (if any) and tune PDS limits

Still working on a few more tools to help both PDS admins and relay operators. More to come.

All these are hugely inspired by fig's( @bad-example.com ) work on microcosm public infra and based on some suggestions from Bryan( @bnewbold.net ) during the ATProto_NYC meetup.

The relays are public and free to use. They already power a few of my own apps. Please do let me know if you use them and I can keep you in loop for future updates.

Follow @firehose.network for announcements.