Solo Dev's Remote MCP Server: 26% of Hosted Servers Miscounted as Dead
Luca9307 · reddit · 2026-09-08
A solo founder shipped FeedNest, a reader (RSS/YouTube/podcasts/Google News) exposed to agents via a remote MCP server—26 tools, Streamable HTTP only—and shared two hands-on lessons.
1. Auth: OAuth 2.1 + PKCE plus API keys. An unauthenticated initialize gets a 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resourcemetadata=.../.well-known/oauth-protected-resource. A 15k-server dataset counted such 401s as dead; a rerun found 26% of hosted registry servers are alive-but-locked, 88% of which tell clients where to log in. One-line fix: include the resourcemetadata param in the header—half the dataset's "dead ends" had the metadata and just skipped the param.
2. Payload control: list tools never return full text—title, source, date, 200-char preview, ≤100 rows per page with cursor, a countonly flag; full text only via per-article calls, bounding worst-case per call. Zero output schemas across 26 tools with no evidence they change model behavior. Author asks the community about schema value and pagination strategy.
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