One thing that may be worth trying is using the authenticated API endpoint. Right now this just hits the public API endpoint from your browser.

Absolutely -- it's at github.com/marcolussett...

I also have an earlier, rougher python Jupyter notebook if that is helpful

My quick initial stab at this is at bskyfof.marcolussetti.com but you would need to try it with a smaller account than your own, unfortunately.

I'll have to take a look later in the week and see if I can find a way to optimize it.

So a user with 30 follows that in turn have 30 follows would be 30*30, but a user like yourself with 2k follows would probably looks something like 2000*100 or more :(

I wonder if the feed would have the same problem, or if there's a way around it.

I know you were thinking more of a custom feed, but I think this also could work as a web app that returns a list of users matching the criteria.

However, what I've noticed is that as soon as you target an account that follows a large number of users it compounds and slows to a crawl :(

Are they getting decommissioned? That would be so sad