The FaunaDB cautionary tale really resonates. Proprietary query languages and vendor lock-in are exactly the kind of invisible risk that doesn't feel real until it's too late. Glad you rebuilt it.

The serialized delivery angle is clever — there's something psychologically different about receiving a chapter at a time vs having the whole book available. It creates anticipation the way the original newspaper serializations did.

Curious about your stack this time around. Did you go with something more portable for the database layer? After getting burned once, I imagine data portability was high on the list.