Winds

» see winds.getstream.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By the time Winds arrived, anyone still reading feeds had been moved once already against their will, and I had picked up the habit of checking who was paying for a reader before trusting it with a subscription list. Winds gave an unusually clear answer and it was not a reassuring one: nobody was paying, because the reader itself was an advertisement. That mattered less than it should have, and for about three years people read their feeds in it anyway.

Stream sells activity feeds as an API. If you are building a social product and need a timeline that fans out to a million followers without you writing the fan-out, Stream is the company you rent that from. The problem with selling infrastructure is that nobody can see it, so in September 2016 the company opened a repository for a reader application built on top of its own product, and in March 2018 announced the rewrite that most people actually used.

The result was better looking than it needed to be. React and Redux on the front, Express on the back, Stream supplying the feeds and the recommendations, Algolia doing search, MongoDB Atlas holding the data. The whole thing shipped under a BSD 3-clause license, so you could read every line of it and run your own copy against your own keys. Stream also ran a hosted version at winds.getstream.io that cost nothing and asked for nothing but an email address.

It collected 9,087 stars and 623 forks, which for a desktop-shaped reader with no business model is a real number. The last push landed on 11 October 2021. The following day the repository was archived, and GitHub's read-only banner has been the project's official status ever since.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the showcase app ~

Winds was not a product that failed to find users. It was a sales demo that found them. That is a harder position to occupy, because the better it worked the more it cost a company that never meant to be in the reader business. Every bug report was support work on something that generated no revenue, and every person who signed into the hosted copy was a user Stream had acquired by accident and now had to think about.

The README carried a badge reading "Built With love in Boulder, CO" next to the build status and the coverage percentage. Read the badges in order and the purpose is obvious: a recruiting document and a technical argument, wearing an application. Developers evaluating a feeds API could study a complete production codebase instead of a tutorial, and selling infrastructure that way works right up to the moment the demo develops a userbase with expectations.

~ read only since october ~

The repository is still there and still public. Archiving on GitHub deletes nothing. It freezes issues and pull requests behind a banner, and the code stays readable indefinitely. An open-source project ending this way loses less than a dead domain does, and those 623 forks mean the code outlived the decision in several hundred copies.

The hosted app is the part with no obituary. Stream never published a date for switching off winds.getstream.io, and the subdomain now answers by redirecting to getstream.io/blog/winds-rss/, the March 2018 post that introduced it. The post carries two notices now. One says the article is archived and may not reflect current products. The other says, plainly, that Winds has been sunset and is no longer supported.

So the address where the reader used to live now serves its own launch announcement, with the closure notice bolted onto the top. That leaves 12 October 2021 as the firmest thing anyone outside the company can point at, so this page is dated from the repository going read-only rather than from the last morning somebody loaded their feeds in it.

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