Control your scroll

Last week NBC News spoke with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about what makes Bluesky different. She said that Bluesky was a chance to “choose your own adventure” and “control your scroll”. We love the way Bluesky is thinking about this — we should all get to pick what we see on our socials, and Graze is here to help you do it!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• The NFL is facing an antitrust lawsuit over its refusal to let its teams use Bluesky. The civil action has been brought by fans who don’t want to use X to follow their favourite teams and players.

• We loved this great profile of @trezy.codes and the work he’s done building community with his game industry labeller.

• And we also loved this deep dive on FAFO with Jaz, an infrastructure engineer at Bluesky, about how they are thinking about scaling. Learn more about the firehose!

Upgrades and Improvements:

• Our caching layer is now only 15 seconds! (as compared to 60 seconds before). What this means is (a) feeds will be much much quicker to update with the latest content (often sub-minute), and (b) users will get more variety in sponsored and rotating posts on loads. For all practical purposes, we're nearly real-time in our ability to translate content from the firehose to feeds!

• You can now manually add posts to a feed! This is really great news when you are testing and fixing your feed, and discover that some content has been excluded.

• If you’re adding or excluding a starter pack or list of users, we’re now rendering the name of that pack or list, making it easy to see what’s going on.

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 taurean, creator of, among other things, the Coffee Nerds feed!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

So I joined Blue Sky really early. Twitter was the first social platform that I was really active on and loved. But Twitter definitely had a problem with how they enforced content moderation. What appealed to me about Bluesky was moving away from a single organization being the arbiter of what's allowed and who owns data and being locked into one specific platform. When they shared that they were looking for testers for their iOS app I volunteered and got an invite from Jay in February when Bluesky first opened their doors.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

Honestly, the thing that inspired me to make a feed was really to just kick the tires. I really liked the approach of there not being a singular algorithm that Bluesky would push and instead hopefully users would make their own Bluesky experience. If everyone had their own thing there wouldn't be one defining feed that dictated what was popular, and that could be gamed. So I made my first feed for people who are really into making coffee.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I don't like using other social sites to explain how a new one works, but honestly the best shorthand for explaining what a feed is almost like a subreddit. But the reason why it's important is because it allows people to choose how they consume content, and what content they're consuming. So you might have a feed that allows you to stay up to date on everything that's happening politically, but if you need a calmer part of the internet and you don't want to sign up for a new service, you're just trying to maintain one social platform, you can have a feed that's just matching the tone you're looking for in that moment.

We're not beholden to a social platform deciding that chronological feeds are out, or you just have to use this singular algorithm that might deprioritize external URLs, which harms journalists, or platforms that heavily prioritize video if that's not the kind of content you like. And I think it also allows us all to be a lot more genuine when there's no singular feed to game. The thing we’re left with is people sharing the stuff that they want to share and people reacting to the things they want to react to instead of being manipulated by an algorithm.

Tell us about your feeds.

So all of my feeds are actually really simple. They centre around specific interests like the Coffee Nerds feed for coffee or the Scentsky feed for fragrance. Starting a new community is really hard 'cause you need people. I wanted the content for those feeds to be focussed and relevant. And then if you wanted to add your posts to that feed you could use a specific hashtag. I really want it to work where you don't need to explicitly try and use that feed. You'll just post what’s relevant and it'll show up in the feed and maybe people who follow that feed react to you, and then community just naturally develops that way.

That's so far worked well with the coffee feed. And I just started the scent one very recently, so hopefully that'll kick off in the same way. I also have a handful of feeds that all cater to the same community. So I've been a user for posts.cv for a few years now. And it's been a really nice corner of the internet that is just filled with like really great people that I've enjoyed getting to know. But pretty recently they announced that they would be sunsetting the platform. A few people immediately jumped into action to start building a replacement. But one, that's a lot of work. And two, it's a really small community. So being able to quickly create a handful of feeds to house a community that's like looking for a new home was really easy. I mean, it took me maybe 15 minutes to put together. I spent more time writing a guide on how to use Blue Sky than I did setting up the feeds themselves! And it's worked really well. I'm able to stay in touch with those same people and continue to build those relationships. And we get all of the tech stuff for free by being on Bluesky. So Graze made that really easy to stay in touch with and hold on to that community.

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

I don't have any cool tricks for fancy logic. But I think actually maybe that's a good thing! Using Graze was super easy. Some of my feeds are just a handful of search terms and specific hashtags. And my other feed is content from users of a list that I manually curate myself. So I just made a Google form that people can fill out to get added. And we are at somewhere in the neighborhood of like 150 to 200 people in that community now. And then we just have our feeds for everything that everyone posts or just root level posts. So you know it's just people in the community. I think if I needed to give advice for someone looking to build their first feed, I would just really try and push for them to focus on quality over quantity. And so by that I mean if you're starting a new community from scratch, focus on getting the posts that you're like 90% sure are going to be relevant to people rather than trying to get everything that might relate to that topic on the same feed.

What do you think is the future of social media?

Man, the future of social media. I think I have to fight my natural urge to be more pessimistic. I'm really concerned, especially with how AI can be used, that we might really lean into the bot problem and get so used to it that it just becomes even more commonplace, where we're seeing accounts and we're not sure if they're real people. I think it's really easy to see a small group of people posting about a subject or taking a specific stance and assume that they reflect some quiet population that feels the same way. And so we might interpret that to mean that this is actually a common perspective or thought to have. And so I'm really concerned about how that can sway public opinion.

And I'm also concerned with how these large companies can dictate what content is allowed and what isn't and what gets widespread distribution and what gets deprioritized. I also... It's maybe kind of a romantic idea, but I don't like that building for the web is almost exclusively viewed through the lens of people who are professionally developers. I really like the idea that just as a hobby, almost like going to the store and buying a journal, you can create this space that you really own and you're able to publish and share online and meet like-minded people and build relationships from really far away, relationships that you maybe would never have that can grow to become really important to you. I've had that experience, especially with the way the web was earlier. So I guess my more optimistic take is I hope, and to some extent, this is being reflected in reality, that people start to see how dangerous centralized social media platforms can be. And it becomes more commonplace for people to want something that's different.

What I really like about Bluesky is we're at least at a point where it's potentially possible for a decentralized platform to be accepted at a wide scale, for people to own their own data and be able to move to something else if they don't like who their digital landlord is. I guess that's the short of it: ownership and people having more influence and a voice on social platforms.

Try this:

Last week we talked about using markdown in sticky posts, but we didn’t talk about how!

You can use the tweetdeck-like app for posting to Bluesky called deck.blue

It’s free to use with a Patreon to support the developer and unlock extra features. You can read more about it here.

deck.blue supports markdown in Bluesky posts, so it’s a great choice for creating your pinned and rotating posts where you want to link to more detailed information in an uncluttered way.

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.