@MastodonEngineering

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.