exerinity


Redsky is back... for now

16 October 2025 - My Bluesky app, Redsky, is ...alive again?

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20 days ago, on the 25th of September, I announced that Redsky, my privacy-focused read-only viewer for Bluesky, was shutting down due to aggressive and malicious scraping activity. I was ready to just shelf it and move on, but, I decided that I actually like the things I make. Like most of my projects, I made it for myself to use.

Redsky makes it easy for me to quickly grab a handful of my own posts to share or use for whatever, and it was genuinely a pretty cool project. And as I get more and more sucked into Bluesky's algorithm over Twitter's, I need it more. Yeah, I'm a loser. So, it's back online, but with some changes:

  • Redsky is heavily rate-limited. I added rate-limiting rules to Cloudflare, and internally, it's 15 requests per minute, and if you trip that and make another 20 requests in the minute, you're blocked for a day.
  • robots.txt is now in place, blocking everything. This will sacrifice some exposure... but I couldn't give a shit about that. As I said earlier, my projects are for me.
  • I have aggressively blocked large cloud providers by ASN and IP ranges. Fully blocked, not challenged or rate-limited. Also, any requests made without a proper User-Agent, underlying browser or operating system, you're blocked too.

I get that these might be drastic, but, while it was going, Redsky had SEVEN MILLION FUCKING REQUESTS IN A MONTH only to user profiles!

So yeah, just wanted to talk about it a little bit, that's about it, see ya.

Part of a series on Redsky: