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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

The good news: After 4 iterations, the new fully Rust-based architecture is almost ready. The historical backfill is running, and experiments with the new query engine have been very promising. I am confident that the new engine will deliver and am excited about the amazing new feeds it will enable!

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!

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

I’m super happy to pay on a per-feed basis to support the service! It doesn’t make sense for me to set up a whole server with a firehose consumer for my one lil feed that sees a post every ~3 days, so I’m happy to chip in to the economy of scale you have with your consumers and indexers!

I have some feeds with your service & it was great when Bluesky first started, but since they made #Hashtags work I'm finding less and less people subscribing to my feeds. You have worked very hard on this & I for one appreciate what you done from day one , but unfortunately # is winning.

i still love feeds because you can combine many hashtags into one spot!