Handling search rate-limits (public search)

[hzoo]

• the basic way of implementing this idea is to use Bluesky's /searchPosts endpoint which sometimes allows for public access (meaning no login). This was working at the time I was creating the extension but I've seen other issues as well as comments from the team that sometimes there are stronger rate limits or removal of the non-authenticated feature when it's getting expensive.

So you get a 403 {"error":"AuthMissing","message":"Authentication Required"}.

this isn't a problem for /getPostThread which is why public comment systems are fine (no search involved since you are just getting the post/thread data for a specific post)

• require all users to login (not great)
• follow Bryan's suggestion of creating own focused/limited search endpoint. This indexer would only do things by url so maybe it wouldn't cost too much (would need to try it). all requests go to this backend instead.
• just use own endpoint that has it's own logged in user that also proxies /searchPosts and cache the results globally?
• create a canonical "post" per url under the account/bot so that we can fetch that post instead of searching (easier to handle). maybe look into what aliasing urls might look like (Handling URLs #2). This is the easiest to do but works best when the extension itself has a lot of users, and it wouldn't put up users not using the extension. this would be done in addition to ^.