@Jason Self, about pump2status.net, the site goes up and down all the time (I have reported that some months ago...), but it works, once you pick a moment when it's up and you configure your account. My notes (if they are shorter than 140 chars) arrive my quitter.se account every day, even if the site looks down.

For getting it up (so you can setup your bridge), I think the best is that you mail admin [at] e14n.com. I would do it myself, but I prefer that other people show that the service is interesting too (sometimes I think I am the only user of pump2status.net...).

About the Firehose, I see live instances of it at https://pump.mamalibre.com.ar/ , https://www.inventati.org/ppump/ , https://hubub.polari.us/#page=1 ....

In the pump.io wiki there's a page Clients with detailed info about much of the software/service pieces that form the pump.io network.

Hope that helps!