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For the past year, I've been working hard on HappyView. I've built so many features, and there are now hundreds of apps built on top of it. It's been a long, winding ride, and I've loved every minute of it. #atproto

I realized a few months ago that HappyView users were paying to host the software on various services, but HappyView makes none of that money. Beyond that, those platforms don't offer anything special for HappyView, or for atproto users. Now I'm no mathemagician, but that doesn't add up.

Over the past month I've been building this platform to offer managed hosting for HappyView instances. But I wanted to make it so hosted HappyView makes sense, rather than Just Another Hosting Platform™.

I'll talk more over the coming weeks about why HappyProto is really special, but I'll start with just one example: instant backfill.

When you run a backfill on HappyView today, it hits the relay to find out what repos have records in a collection. Then it hits the PLC directory potentially millions of times to find the relevant PDSes. Then it hits every PDS to collect the data. It's a heavy load on the entire network.

HappyProto alleviates that entirely by keeping the entire network close to your HappyView instance. If you try to backfill Standard Site documents in HappyView today, it takes ~3 hours to get every record. On HappyProto, it takes ~30 seconds. The only bottleneck is your scripts.

I hope you'll join me on this adventure. Go to happyproto.at and throw your email in the queue to be notified when everything launches. 🥰 If you want to join the invite-only beta, make sure to leave a note about what you're building. 😉 #atproto