The new standard gauge

Graze is Bluesky. By You.

October 20, 2025

Here at Graze we’ve started to use an analogy for how ATProto represents something genuinely new in the social ecosystem, and the attention economy more broadly: the standard railway gauge.

We work at Graze because we envision a future of open social that is locked open by default for all stakeholders - for all curators to build the experiences they need for themselves and their communities, for all readers to consume information the way they want, and for all platforms to be free of the burden of reinventing that wheel every time.

More than that, this article shows just one small case study, working with Skylight, that highlights how being on a standard gauge makes all sorts of collaborations possible and straightforward:

In the pre-ATProto world, it'd be immensely painful for us to just start helping Skylight. We'd have to get access to all their data. We'd have to encode all the videos on their platform into our database, get some vector representations for all the videos, and work through their idiosyncratic track widths of how they laid out their system, from API down to record schema. But because we are interoperable, the work was already done.

We can just do things! Together!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

  • Bluesky has released their most recent Protocol Checkin (Fall 2025) — an important read for everyone who cares about ATProto, decentralization, and the path forward (and we’re excited to get a shout-out!).

  • We’re delighted to be sponsoring the next ATProto Community Conference in Vancouver, March 2026 — we hope to see you there!

  • A good reminder that Bluesky has all kinds of incredibly granular settings that help make your experience a happy and healthy one online:

Upgrades and Improvements:

  • We’ve just announced the Graze Archives, two S3 buckets that provide enriched Bluesky data snapshots as SQLite databases:

    • graze-turbo-01: Turbostream archive (hydrated references, no ML inferences)

    • graze-mega-02: Megastream archive (turbostream + ML inferences)

    These are on a requestor-pays basis for researchers, developers, archivists, and other folks looking to push the boundaries of the ATmosphere.

  • If you’ve been enjoying our new brand illustration, you should check out the gorgeous range of default feed avatars from it that you can use!

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 Sophie Greenwood who’s behind PaperSkygest!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined Bluesky in February 2024 with some other PhD students -- I think we'd been talking about how it can be useful to use "academic Twitter/X" (i.e., follow other academics and discuss/announce new research). Someone mentioned Bluesky as a cool new alternative, we all followed each other and then I forgot about it. In late fall 2024, there was a wave of researchers who moved from X to Bluesky and were working on creating an "academic Bluesky" community. I found the content on Bluesky really engaging -- I think the authenticity and the smaller community appealed to me -- so I went from occasionally logging on X to checking Bluesky every day.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

I'd been working on a project with my PhD advisor Nikhil Garg on understanding fairness tradeoffs in recommendation algorithms, and we were looking for opportunities to deploy a recommendation algorithm for academic papers so we could study these tradeoffs in a real system. Nikhil noticed that while there was a growing network of researchers on Bluesky, there was no personalized feed for academic content. We decided it would be fun and helpful to try and spin up a custom feed; a week or so later, we had a working prototype of Paper Skygest.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I start by referencing platforms like X or Instagram which have multiple (platform-run) feeds that the user can switch between. Bluesky offers a marketplace of feeds you can subscribe to, and you can switch between them just as easily as on other platforms. These feeds aren't run by Bluesky; the algorithms are designed and controlled by ordinary users. Usually, a demonstration is the most helpful: I'll open Bluesky and show them how easy it is to swipe back and forth between feeds to get different recommendations.

What do you think is the future of social media?

I'm hoping we see users getting more and more agency in what they see online. I think that a lot of users are dissatisfied with their experiences on social media with traditional recommendation-- for example, research shows that users strategize about the way they interact with content to align personalized algorithms with their interests, and that's certainly been my experience as well. I think recommendation algorithms of the future will give users finer-grained control over what they see while preserving personalization / helping users understand their own preferences, without adding too much friction. In this vein, the option on Bluesky to curate a collection of custom feeds or create your own custom feed via Graze is an exciting step for user agency.

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.