Relay by Loops is an ActivityPub relay and discovery service designed primarily for ingesting public Loops content.
It helps Loops servers discover public videos and creators from across the network without requiring every server to independently discover and follow the same accounts.
Relay by Loops is built for:
- Discovering public Loops content
- Improving federation between Loops servers
- Reducing duplicated discovery work across participating servers
- Supporting broader ActivityPub ingestion over time
While the relay is optimized for Loops, it may also consume compatible public content from other ActivityPub platforms.
Participating servers subscribe to the relay through ActivityPub.
The relay receives public activities from connected servers and distributes eligible activities to other subscribers. Loops servers can then process those activities for discovery, recommendations, moderation, and federation.
Relay by Loops is intended specifically for content ingestion and discovery. It is not a general-purpose ActivityPub relay.
Relay by Loops currently focuses on:
- Public video content
- Loops-compatible ActivityPub objects
- Server-to-server federation
Support for additional ActivityPub software and object types may be added as compatibility improves.
Relay by Loops only processes content that is publicly federated through ActivityPub.
It does not provide access to:
- Private posts
- Followers-only posts
- Direct messages
- Non-federated content
Server administrators remain responsible for how relayed content is stored, displayed, filtered, and moderated on their own servers.
Relay by Loops may reject, filter, suspend, or remove servers and activities that create moderation, operational, security, or abuse concerns.
Subscribing servers should continue to maintain their own:
- Domain blocklists
- Content moderation policies
- Safety filters
- Abuse reporting systems
Participation in the relay does not replace local moderation.
Relay by Loops is under active development.
Federation behaviour, supported activity types, compatibility, and APIs may change while the service matures.
Before participating, please read our Code of Conduct.
You can connect with the community here:
- Pixelfed: @loops@pixelfed.social
- Discord: Join our community
This project is open-sourced software licensed under the AGPLv3 license.
This project is funded through NGI Zero Core,
a fund established by NLnet with support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program.
Learn more at the NLnet project page.
Thanks to the Fastly Fast Forward program, Loops uses Fastly CDN and Object Storage to serve videos globally for free.
