Post

Hi! SkyFeed is struggling and I need to find a solution. If you don't know SkyFeed, it's a service I built 2 years ago, enabling anyone to build and publish feeds using a visual block-based editor. SkyFeed is still hosting the most feeds on Bluesky, but that comes at a cost [1/X]

Let's get straight to the point: Renting servers for hosting all 75k+ SkyFeed feeds for millions of users daily costs me ~1094 EUR/month SkyFeed is 100% free, so the only income is my GitHub Sponsors (github.com/redsolver) with ~191 EUR/month The math does not quite work out here.

Donations mostly covered costs at the end of 2024, but expenses skyrocketed as I scaled everything to keep up with Bluesky growing quickly. While fighting the fires popping up in the infrastructure, I couldn't really focus on releasing new features, fix bugs or implement long-promised improvements

It felt wrong to ask for money before delivering the level of service I expect. But being a solo developer and SkyFeed not my main job made that near-impossible. I also realized that the current architecture struggled to keep up, let alone enable new resource-intensive features I promised long ago.

The first component I started to rewrite was the indexer, but I quickly realized the storage and query layers also needed a ground-up rebuild. This took far longer than expected and was the main reason for not improving the SkyFeed app or adding support for new features like video

Lol I admit my first thought was "don't say rewrite it in Rust, don't say rewrite it in Rust" 😄

The old query engine was also written in Rust, but it was pretty ugly code :P so now it's nicer Rust code!

Ah, interesting - so which parts were in Dart?

However, even the new engine doesn't change the fact that SkyFeed needs revenue. First of all, I am committed to *never* adding ads, because they go against the spirit of algorithmic choice. Also, the entire backend will continue to be fully open-source and all existing features will remain free.

So the only solution that feels fair to me is adding an optional SkyFeed Pro subscription which would support the project and add new resource-intensive features for advanced feed builders, like unlimited history or personalized feeds. I'm still open to suggestions, so please tell me what you think!

i would love to pay for pro, i'm not interested in more frequent caching but a deeper history (doesn't need to be unlimited, maybe a few weeks rather than the current three-ish days) would definitely solve my challenges.

For now, the plan would be to launch with just one feature: Currently, feeds are cached for up to 5 minutes, depending on server load. If you pay, all feeds you publish would update in real-time and feeds used by paid users would also update more frequently, keeping their contents fresh for everyone