Permanently shutting down Redsky
2 November 2025
Start speech
17 days ago, on the 16th of October, I announced that Redsky, my privacy-focused read-only viewer for Bluesky, was coming back online after shutting it down due to aggressive scraping and general misuse.
Since I've kinda just... had enough of Bluesky, I don't need this anymore. Not that I "needed" it in the first place, but now, it's completely useless. I said previously that I made Redsky for myself to use, but Bluesky has just been disappointing me more and more and I don't enjoy it anymore. Really, I never enjoyed it, I just stuck around and tried posting stuff.
I'll probably close my Bluesky account later on. It was somewhere to retreat to when Twitter became absolute chaos (X.com), but since then, I've switched Twitter accounts and my new timeline and basically, everything, is amazing. I'm sticking with Twitter, because as corny as this sounds, it will recover from how far it fell during the acquisition mess. I think it still has some resilience; and if not, I'm not leaving until it's fully underwater, and even then, I might stick around.
My friend actually got me an invite key to sneak into Bluesky early, around December 2023, about two months before opening to the general public. I made my first post in German, went silent for 10 months, then came back and started slowly using it. I ramped up usage in mid 2025- but, I'm sidetracking. Back to Redsky.
Also, it seems that my feeble attempts to curb the scraping and misuse of Redsky have failed. Check this:
You can see there's lots of waves of traffic, then sudden drops to zero (or a lot less anyway). That means, my rate limiting system entirely failed, and wasn't persistent. That means, scrapers are still going, getting rate limited, backing off (or still trying and getting nothing), then coming back for seconds and thirds. A cat-and-mouse game that I'm tired of playing and losing.
Furthermore, I am not very good at Cloudflare Workers. My element is PWAs and Discord bots. I promised myself that I'd add all these cool things to Redsky, but... for what? Previously, when you Google "exerinity.com", all you would see are results from Redsky. That is bad. Redsky is not a website. It is a web app. But, that's probably my negligence for not checking all the boxes and prematurely failing to add a robots.txt.
So, in conclusion, Redsky is going offline again and this time, not returning. I am not releasing the source code - you could probably make a better version with ChatGPT. I don't wanna put up a fight for nothing. That fight is both wrangling code and wrangling bots. I'm out. To anyone who actually used it, which I would bet my entire life savings that's 0 people, thank you, seriously.
Part of a series on Redsky:
- Redsky is shutting down
- Redsky is back... for now
- Permanently shutting down Redsky (you are here)