Can't subscribe to a few Bluesky private profiles

[piperfreeze]

Hello,

I’ve noticed as I migrate to Bluesky that you can paste the profile link in and 9/10 times it will fetch it no problem.

I’ve noticed a few profiles, I’ve confirmed they are public, consistently fail to add with the error “This address does not point to an RSS feed or a website with an RSS feed.”

Examples:

• Bluesky
• Bluesky

Any idea whats going on here?

Thanks,
Andrew

[samuelclay]

First one is a private feed:

As is the second one:

[piperfreeze]

My bad.

[samuelclay]

Thanks for bringing this up! What needs to happen is that the error message should give you more information. In this case, we’re getting a 200 OK response so I can’t branch on a 403/401 Forbidden/Unauthorized.

Someday soon I’m going to apply an LLM to these types of fetch errors and see if I can get it to figure out what’s going on. In this case, it would see the "Sign in Required: This account has requested that users sign in to view their profile. " in big centered letters and realize this is actually a 403 and should respond appropriately with that error message.

Once LLM prices come down another 10x (they went down 100x in the last two years alone) I’ll see where I can add it. I just started using OpenAI’s embeddings API to create the new Discover Feeds and Related Stories features (launching hopefully within the next couple weeks), but it’s still not dirt cheap, just a reasonable one-time line item on the budget for the month