Breaking news

We hit an incredible milestone at Graze this week. We’ve now delivered feeds to 5 million readers on Bluesky! We're thrilled to support our brilliant feed operators creating amazing experiences for their communities, and humbled to be able to help create the future of social with you all. Let’s keep growing!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Bluesky’s Starter Packs have played a crucial role in the growth of the platform, according to new research from Lancaster University. Starter packs were adopted rapidly by Bluesky users, with more than 335,000 created in the first six months of their launch. They accounted for up to 43% of people following others in Bluesky during peak periods, and contributed to nearly 20% of all follow relationships across the full study period. Users included in starter packs received up to 85% more followers and posted 60% more than similar users.

• We love this @classicweb.site, which posts screenshots of websites and blogs from the Dot-Com, Web 2.0 and the 2010s eras. A blast from the past.

• A great response to the recent “Is Bluesky dying?” discourse, this from Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: The Bluesky Backlash Misses the Point. (Bonus: Graze mentioned!)

• We were sorry to hear that @blueskyfeeds.com is shutting down in July. To help make sure the feeds built on that platform survive we've implemented an automatic migration to our platform! If you know someone who has a feed hosted with @blueskyfeeds.com just send them across to graze.social to get started.

Upgrades and Improvements:

• Our tools for advertisers have levelled up again! When creating a campaign on Graze you can now also create posts for the campaign, add clickable links to your posts, track every interaction automatically, and measure your campaign's success in real-time.

• Feed operators can now add some pizzaz to your custom feed embed by using a custom font! Read more here.

  

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 chatting with @zombiegomoan who built a breaking news feed to cover the ICE protests in Los Angeles.

What made you decide to build a custom feed around this event, and how did you approach curating it in real time?

I'm a lifelong Angeleno. I love this city, and so I had previously created a feed for the community, the Los Angeles Metro Area feed, which picks up mentions of any neighborhood in LA or city across the broader metro area. The day after the first ICE raids in LA, I received a handful of notifications from people linking to that feed saying they were using it to keep up to date on the raids and protesters' response, which made me realize I should probably create a more purpose-built feed. So, I made the LA vs. ICE feed that--in its earliest stages--just picked up posts with LA + ICE/DHS and gradually evolved from there.

What kinds of sources or voices were most important to include in the feed, and how did you make decisions about balance or verification?

Initially, the feed had little discrimination, it just pulled in all relevant posts from across the Bluesky firehose. Then @richardferro.xyz, a fellow Angeleno and Graze user, got in touch with me and offered to put together a list of protesters and journalists who were reporting on events live from across the region. From there, I adjusted the feed to only accept reply-type posts from users in that list (and later a couple other lists I found) because I noticed some journalists on-the-ground would use threads to document events.

How did the Graze tooling help you manage fast-moving information differently from other platforms?

Graze makes iterating on your feeds really simple and convenient which is extremely valuable when things are constantly changing. It's easy to open up the editor, add a few keywords, modify my node structure, or even revert to an older version of the feed if needed. Additionally, if a post winds up in the feed that isn't actually relevant, I can run it through the debugger to quickly identify what I need to revise in order to keep the feed on theme.

Did anything surprise you about how people interacted with the feed or the kinds of posts that resonated most?

It's one thing to hear about these ICE abductions or LAPD's response to peaceful protesters through the news and it's an entirely different thing to experience these events through first hand accounts. My feed surfaced a number of first hand accounts ranging from: journalists who got shot by rubber bullets, Downtown LA residents that were tear gassed for trying to go home, and protesters that were brutalized for speaking up against violence and hate. It's not a thing that's happening far away in that imaginary space in people's TVs, it's happening to real human beings, and I think you feel that more viscerally when it's coming directly from someone's personal social media.

What advice would you give to someone thinking of building a custom feed for a rapidly developing story?

Try not to cast too wide of a net. This is a personal vice of mine when it comes to feed building, I want to see ALL of the discourse, but that doesn't make for the highest quality feed. And unfortunately, I tend to not realize that I'm overwhelmed by the flood of content until a day or two after I've published the feed, which can be quite a long time in the context of a rapidly evolving news event. There are too many to mention them all but I highly recommend prospective feed operators check out Graze's community-made custom nodes that can help them filter out spam, bots, untrustworthy websites, and so much more.

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.