Don't abandon ship, take the wheel

“Remember the glory days of blogging and owning our own spaces? Whisper it, but it feels like they're coming back.” We loved this piece from Creative Boom about creatives ditching spaces owned by online “landlords” for communities they build and control. That’s exactly what Graze is all about!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Bluesky has rolled out v1.98, which means you can now restrict the people who reply to your post to followers-only, and you can search posts by user more easily, by clicking through their profile.

• Bluesky user @dame.is has launched cred.blue, an attempt to algorithimically “score” Bluesky accounts’ credibility. Social media olds will remember the days of Klout. Cred.blue is more about ways in which we can assess whether accounts are genuine, authentic, and acting in good faith. “The cred.blue platform is just one experiment among many that is attempting to help people understand which social media accounts are more (or less) trustworthy.”

• Academics at the University of Zurich have released a study into network polarisation on Bluesky. They examine a dataset from Feb 2023 to May 2024 and conclude that Bluesky’s network structure is not dissimilar to other large social networks. They also note that while a large number of custom feeds have been created, users’ uptake of them appears to be limited! We need to change that.

Upgrades and Improvements:

• 🎉  Huge news this week — We have Backfill! That’s right! When you create a feed on Graze now, our little workers will fill the feed with posts immediately, no more waiting for it to populate over time. And if you make changes to your logic, you can hit the Backfill button in your feed settings and it will clear your feed and refill it, like magic.

• We’ve improved your analytics dashboard. You can now drill in to see data from the last year!

• We’ve introduced the ability to customise your nodes! We know some of you have very complex logic, and now if you right-click on a node, you can change its colour, pattern, and give it a custom title:

  

• And we’ve given you a Brand New Node! Introducing Post Type, a node that lets you include/exclude based on the type of post (replies and quote posts):

  

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 with Richard, creator of the Medsky and Latinsky feeds!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined Bluesky in April 2023 due to my concerns about the spread of misinformation and harmful content after Elon Musk acquired Twitter. After joining Bluesky, I was surprised by the control I had over my network, whether through subscribing to mute/block lists and user-generated feeds, it was really refreshing compared to networks like Meta and X where everything I saw was controlled from behind the scenes.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

Being a Family Medicine doctor, I wanted to make a feed just for my FM community within the medical community on Bluesky (aka Medsky), so the #FMsky feed was born!

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I like to describe feeds as a window, and everything outside of that window is Bluesky. If you want to see a different part of Bluesky, then look out of a different window. Maybe you want a view that has more trees or an open field with a cow or two. If you can’t find a window that has the view you want, there’s tools available like Graze to help you make a window with whatever view you’re looking for.

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

As a proud Costa Rican and Cuban, one of the feeds I’m really proud of helping build is Latinsky. Inspired in large part by the amazing community #Blacksky and the work of Rudy Fraser, Latinsky is a space that centers and celebrates Latinidad.

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

I’m a developer of the Medsky specialty feeds, and one of the ways this system works is through curation lists built from a medical specialties labeler. The @medsky.social labeler can label a user’s account with one of over 270 medical specialties. Depending on what labels a user has on their account, they’ll be sorted into different curation lists. These curation lists are then used to sort medical posts into over 30 different medical feeds.

What do you think is the future of social media?

I believe apps like Bluesky are pioneering the next big step in social media, and it’s a step that centers user control, not just in what they’re seeing on their timelines, but who is in control of their data. Until now we’ve never had the ability to port our social media presence into another app, and having this ability promises greater freedom, community moderation, and hopefully a better and safer social media experience for everyone.

Try this:

We know that many people have put time and effort into building custom feeds themselves, or using other feed builders. We’re really excited for you to give Graze a try, and so we’ve written a guide to Migrating your Feed. This will walk you through making a test feed on Graze, and then using our super-simple migration tool you can bring across all your existing likes and subscribers.

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.