A world without Caesars

Graze is Bluesky. By You.

March 19, 2025

If you were watching Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber speak at SxSW last week, you’ll have seen Graze get a shout out! We love Jay’s whole message, about the open web and decentralised social media — a world without emperors — it’s exactly what Graze is all about.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

Upgrades and Improvements:

  • We now have a status page to help you out when it seems like the feeds have fallen over.

  • Here at Graze we’re starting to have some awesome conversations with academics who are interested in researching how custom feeds work. We’re keen to help rigorously test questions like "how do we design feeds to increase reader satisfaction instead of platform exploitation of time-on-site? How do we design feeds to lessen harassment or harm? What does it mean for a user to have a satisfying feed in the first place?" and so on. We’ve created a new channel in our Discord to discuss how this might work, how people opt in and out, and what other things we need to take into account. We’d love you to come join the conversation!

Get to know the Fold:

Each newsletter, we’ll chat to someone who is using Graze to do awesome stuff. If you’d like to share your work with us, reply and let us know!

This week we’re talking to Mir, creator of the Art Feed Collection and Art Feed Collection - New Video Feeds

When did you join Bluesky and why?

In the 26 years I’ve spent in artist spaces online, I’ve never seen as much dissatisfaction, distrust and despair for how socials are run as there is today. When I heard that Bluesky might be different, I was eager to try it! I asked around until I got an invite and started scoping it out on May 13th, 2023. I felt like a scout, reporting back to other artists - we were all, understandably, wary. There were some bumps along the way, but I could tell the Bluesky team was listening to users. They were trying to make something better, and they were giving us tools to shape our own experience. I saw the potential for early adopting communities to not just build their own spaces, but be the voices in the room being heard by the Bluesky dev team. I set to work helping artists join and get started on Bluesky. I created a public google doc that started as a list of artists who wanted an invite. That then expanded into a list of Bluesky artist profile links, a list of art feeds, a pretty rough looking feed building guide, and other resources.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

Early on, we didn’t have Lists or Starter Packs. We didn’t even have hashtags or a feed search yet. As an artist, one of the first things you’d do when you joined Bluesky was search for art. Then you might check out art feeds people shared by word of mouth, or in an external database like goodfeeds.co by jcsalterego.bsky.social. The most popular ones were full of AI images and NFTs at the time. And not by accident, the feed creators themselves were AI and/or NTF producers, and were promoting posts from those communities alongside regular artist’s posts in their feeds. Many artists who had just joined Bluesky hoping for a better experience found this extremely disheartening and spoke out about it. However you feel about AI or NFTs, artists have good reason to be angry about them. They should not have to view or be lumped in with something they don’t support.

Once again I saw an opportunity to build the experience we wanted to have. I looked to other growing community feeds for inspiration, like Science, by danirabaiotti.bsky.social and bossett.social, and the furryli.st feed collection by otter.sh. Then on July 1st, 2023 I built my first two art feeds using Skyfeed, Art: What’s Hot and Art: New Posts. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve lived on the internet long enough to mess with html and css, so I figured I could learn enough about RegEx to serve my needs. redsolver.dev, and every other person I talked to while building my first feeds were all very helpful! I really appreciate that, so I’ve done my best to share what I’ve learned with others whenever I can.

I couldn’t just stop at two, I saw so much potential and feed building was pretty fun! I made feeds for what I wanted to see and what I wanted to keep tabs on. Not just viewing and sharing art, but a network of places for artists like me to grow and thrive in! Avenues for shared interests, or small business or even finding a job. All focusing on supporting human artists, while filtering out AI and NFTs. I released the first 11 feeds as “The Art Feed Collection” and was delighted with the community response! It really took off! Since then, I’ve continued to maintain and improve upon these feeds. I think Art: For Hire and Art: Jobs have been some of the most difficult ones and I’m always looking for ways to improve them.

In January Bluesky released video feeds and I was very excited to try them! I ended up trying a couple of new feed builders in order to do that, including Graze. It didn’t take long then to create my video feeds for artists to watch each other create, show off their wares or get inspired.

In addition to video feeds, Graze lets me get usage analytics for my feeds. This has already helped me make new choices that will hopefully help get more eyes on people’s art. For example, now that I know that the majority of users are using Art: What’s Hot and Art: New Posts, I know that if an artist only posts to something more niche like Art: Crowdfunding, they will get far less views. That’s not good! When you’re running a Kickstarter for your project, you need to get the word out! So I updated the big feeds to also receive posts from the designated hashtags of all the more niche feeds in the collection as well. I was so impressed that I migrated the rest of my feeds to Graze to start getting more insight as soon as possible.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I describe feeds as being like a search query you’ve saved for easy access to later. They can be as simple or complex as you like. Let’s say you’re a fan of Splatoon, and you want to see posts about that, so you type “Splatoon” into Bluesky’s search bar and see all the latest posts about that. You can pin that search and check it every day if you want. But you will have limited ways to sort and filter those posts.

Maybe you decide you only want to see posts with photos. And then you want #art to be present. And you don’t want to see NSFW art or AI, so you apply some filters. You choose to sort them by most liked posts at the top. Maybe you even want just it based on a list of your favorite artists. You can set all of these parameters in a feed builder. The resulting pinned feed is like accessing this saved advanced search query with one click.

Tell us about one of your feeds and the community it’s built.

Art: New Posts is really a good portal for new artists coming to Bluesky. The main hashtag to send a post to the feed is #art. This is a super common tag for artists to try even if they don’t know how tags will work on the platform yet. Additionally, the feed looks for a long list of art terms and phrases. So even people who don’t tag their art might get discovered just by talking about it. I hope that my feeds are scooping people up and helping connect them with the communities they’re seeking. If you ever feel like it, pop your head in here and give an art post with no comments some love, you’ll really make someone’s day!

Show us a cool bit of logic from one of your feeds!

My feeds are actually built fairly simply. There is one main hashtag I guide people to use for each for simplicity sake. Then an expanded list of tags and keywords behind the scenes that aided discovery before tagging for feeds really caught on. The feeds are filtered by an exclusion list of AI and NFT related tags, and davis.social’s aimod.social moderation list. There are additional filtered terms based on the context of each feed to keep posts relevant. For example, #commissionsearned (referring to commissions earned when a person makes a purchase through an Amazon affiliate link) doesn’t belong in Art: Commissions (where artists are posting their commission examples and information.)

Here’s one of my newer feeds I’m really enjoying right now - it’s called Art: Process Vids. This is in the video feed format, so you can full screen a video and just scroll from one to the next. I find it really relaxing to watch artists create, especially if it’s traditional media. Relax, watch, learn, and be inspired to make something yourself. I hope more people will discover just how cool this feed is soon!

What do you think is the future of social media?

We’ve had access to social media long enough now that the potential for harm has become very apparent. There are studies being done on the effects it has on mental health. Social media burnout among artists is extremely common. I think we are only just starting to really address how to maintain healthier relationships with this incredibly powerful tool in our pockets. Being able to curate our own experience online is a major step in the right direction.

I would personally really like it if we were moving toward simplification and focus with the AT Protocol. Sometimes, less is more, truly. For too long I’ve felt like I have to maintain a presence on fistfuls of socials in order to reach the widest possible audience and run a successful small business. Always with the mindset that I “shouldn’t keep all my eggs in one basket” because if a social platform changes in a way that I don’t like, I’d need to be established on others to fall back on. Each time I add another platform, I start all over again. When I’m keeping up with them, I feel spread thin, and when I’m not, I feel like I’m failing. It’s exhausting.

I see potential for AT Protocol to end that cycle. We could focus on using the social platform we enjoy most. We’d build our preferred experience there to minimize “time regretted” spent with it. Hopefully, we’d have more energy to be our authentic selves and connect with people when we aren’t spending so much time maintaining multiple socials. If a new app comes along with a layout we like, like Spark or Pinksky, we’re already set up there with our post history and all our social connections. Should one AT Protocol app change in a way we don’t like, we take our entire account to another one.

I don’t know enough about building social media to guess what the future will actually be. All I know is that I want us all to have a happier, and healthier relationship with it - so I’m going to push for the changes that will facilitate that whenever I can. Right now, we the users, are gaining incredible power to influence how socials are built and run. When we aren’t locked in, and can mass migrate to greener pastures and bluer skies when things get grim, we are empowered. Use your power! Choose which social media platforms you feel safest on, speak out about changes you want to see, and support new avenues for our freedom of online movement into the future.

Try This:

Epic Grazer user @fema (read our interview here) has been working hard on some Moderation Starter Packs. These are easily added to any feed in Graze to filter out content you might not want to see in your feed.

We’re all about supporting happy, healthy, vibrant communities online, and these Starter Packs are the best place to begin. You should also check out our full guide to Moderating Your Feed.

Come and say hello:

We’re building a great community of Graze users supporting one another in the Discord. We’d love to see you there if you’re starting out with feeds, want help, or just want to find some like-minded people.