relay.c.im Will Shut Down on October 31, 2026

TL;DR

relay.c.im will shut down permanently on October 31, 2026.

If your instance is already subscribed, you do not need to disconnect it by hand. When the relay stops, delivery stops with it. Admins who rely on relays should add another one before October 31, 2026.

New subscriptions are closed as of today.

What relay.c.im does

relay.c.im has been our free public ActivityPub relay for small Fediverse instances that want more posts in their federated timelines and hashtag results.

A relay sits between subscribed servers. Servers publish public posts to it, and it sends those posts back out to the other subscribed servers. As relay.toot.io explains, this can help new or smaller servers see more of the Fediverse. It also costs storage, CPU, and moderation time.

Why we are shutting it down

The upstream software we use, ActivityRelay, has been quiet for too long. When we checked on July 6, 2026, the public repository showed April 22, 2025 as the latest visible commit. Running federation software with that little maintenance is a security and compatibility risk.

relay.c.im also does not do much for our own network anymore. C.IM already federates with more than enough instances. A relay helped more in the early days, when discovery and federation reach were thinner.

The subscriber list has collected a lot of dead or unreachable instances. Cleaning that up one domain at a time is busywork, and we have better things to spend admin time on.

There are also better-maintained public relays already doing this job. Keeping our own relay alive just to duplicate that work does not make sense.

Timeline

From July 6, 2026, relay.c.im no longer accepts new subscriptions.

On October 31, 2026, the relay will stop delivering activities permanently. We plan to return 410 Gone from the relay inbox for a while after shutdown so subscribed servers can fail cleanly instead of retrying forever. After that, the domain may stop resolving.

What instance admins should do

If your instance does not rely on relays, no action is needed.

If your instance does rely on relay.c.im, add another relay before October 31, 2026. Two public options to check are relay.toot.io and relay.intahnet.co.uk. relay.toot.io lists https://relay.toot.io/inbox for Mastodon, Misskey, and forks. relay.intahnet.co.uk lists https://relay.intahnet.co.uk/inbox for Mastodon and Misskey. Pleroma-family software, including Akkoma, should use the relay’s /actor endpoint instead.

For a broader directory, use Relay List. It tracks public ActivityPub relays, registration status, online status, and participating server counts. Read the warnings there before adding a relay. Relays increase storage, compute, and moderation load.

For Mastodon, go to Preferences → Administration → Relays, choose Add new relay, paste the new relay inbox URL, and save. After the new relay is connected, remove relay.c.im from the same page.

Thanks

Thank you to the admins who used relay.c.im over the years. It did its job.

This change affects only the public relay. Our other Owl Owl services, including C.IM, P.LU, R.NF, and Image.Hosting, are not affected.