Trust but verify!

The big news in the Bluesky universe this week is the introduction of verification. As the user base grows, knowing that accounts are who they say they are becomes increasingly important for the health of the community.

“In addition to this traditional, top-down verification approach, Bluesky is also offering “trusted verifier” status to a select group of vetted organizations. These organizations will be given a scalloped blue check mark on their Bluesky accounts. The initial batch of publications selected as trusted verifiers includes The New York Times and WIRED, with more in the works.”

Here at Graze we’re delighted to be exactly who we say we are!

And with that in mind, we’re finalising our first set of Community Guidelines in consultation with our community. We’ve been having a great discussion in our discord about how to make the Fold a safe, inclusive, vibrant, healthy community in it for the long haul.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• We’ve got another great case study. This time we’re talking to the San Francisco Standard about how they’re using Graze to hone their social media strategy:

  "The other experiment that The Standard is running is the San Francisco HQ feed. Instead of simply sharing relevant news from The Standard, the HQ feed provides a space for the community to congregate on Bluesky. People discussing the Giants, photographers capturing a beautiful day in the city, and residents debating municipal policies can all find a space for themselves in the HQ feed. Here, instead of directly republishing their work, they create a space that enhances the platform’s value for their readers in the first place.”

• We’re big fans of the Jetstream, and this (growing) list from Andy Baio of interesting projects people are creating with it is awesome.

• Speaking of the Jetstream, we’ve launched the Graze Turbostream! It’s an enriched Jetstream that includes all stale referenced objects, and completely skips the need for redundant hydration API calls!

• This is a fascinating deep dive from Bluesky’s Daniel Holmgren into the ethos of ATproto, how they think about protocol design - its influences, the core innovations, and the opinionated takes that they’ve adopted.

• I got the chance to speak at Sunrise Festival in Sydney, Australia this week about how we can reclaim The Good Internet, and took the opportunity to speak about how Graze is part of that.

Upgrades and Improvements:

• Why should your feed be stuck on Bluesky? You can now embed your feed on any webpage! Just slap it in an iframe and you're good to go. We’ve written it up here. You can access the code from a new nifty share popover:

  

  We love sharing so much you can now share an RSS of your feed

• The public facing "gallery" pages got combined into the "Marketplace". It contains all of the following for anyone to browse:

  • Monetized Feeds

  • Public Feeds

  • Custom Nodes

  Along with this change, our users now have nice public facing profiles to show off all their work, in addition to our existing "ads profile" for soliciting sponsored content.

  

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 the creator of toolify.blue

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined Bluesky in mid-January due to all the political shenanigans that were going on.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

Mostly for funsies. Once I learned about Bluesky I got invested in trying everything out.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

In a single sentence, a fun way to digest social media.

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

Most of my feeds on my main account are for fun so they are still small. I made one for the Super Bowl and a few for Valentine's. My most recent one is for the Splitgate community (a game), it's still kind of small but the goal is that the community will eventually grow on Bluesky.

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

I’ve created a few custom nodes that utilize moderation lists to help clean up feeds:

• Exclude bridged accounts

• Exclude NSFW accounts

• Exclude NSFW posts

The difference between "Exclude NSFW accounts" and "Exclude NSFW posts" is that "Exclude NSFW posts" will still allow SFW posts from known NSFW accounts. That way it avoids excluding a whole account.

toolify.blue was originally inspired by my curiosity to test out the Bluesky network but it quickly evolved into more. While I was part of the Graze community I saw that one of the biggest problems for feed owners was the fact that someone could block you and still show up on your feed and you would never know. With toolify.blue you can see all sorts of important information like who blocks you directly or through a list. As I develop it more I also want to add cool analytics for different aspects of Bluesky. I've recently implemented OAuth on toolify.blue in the hopes of adding cool little features that weren't possible before

What do you think is the future of social media?

It's hard to say what the future holds for social media but I love the idea that Bluesky has brought to light. I'm hoping platforms like Bluesky continue to be developed.

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.