Unblock your Creativity

A wild metric popped up this week. Graze has now served feeds to 3 million people! No way we would have believed if if someone told us in November that we'd be here at this number by May. But for us, it’s just the beginning. The big news in the Fold at the moment is the first-ever Graze Grant round!

From the start, Graze has been about more than just building tools — it’s about supporting a future where communities reclaim control of their digital lives. That means helping others build, too.

This first round includes five unrestricted $1,000 grants to support projects that move the ATProto and Bluesky ecosystem forward — whether that’s developer tools, moderation infrastructure, new feed experiments, or something totally unexpected.

Why now? Because sometimes good ideas get blocked by lack of time, energy, or money. We want to help unblock them.

This is an experiment — the first step in what we hope becomes a much larger grant program. Applications are open now, reviewed on a rolling basis, and close Monday, July 1st at 10pm PST.

Find out more and apply here.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Authentication is hard. We've been juggling OAuth and pockets full of app passwords, and we're know we're not the only ones. That's we’ve open-sourced an all in one, best-in-class service that anyone can use to deal with ATProto authentication - for free. We’re so excited about the work that Nick Gerakines has done to bring this to life. We’re even more excited to see Tori and the crew at Skylight.Social already put it to work.

• Rudy and the incredible crew at BlackSky continue to innovate, announcing that they’ve built their own independent relay!

  For humans: A relay is the control tower of AT Protocol—tracking every takeoff (post, follow, like, etc.) from thousands of runways (PDSs -- these store your account data), recording flight data, and broadcasting it to anyone tuned in. Without it, custom feeds would fly blind. As opposed to endlessly debating decentralization, we secured funding from @skyseed.fund, brought Utkarsh on board, and took major steps toward Blacksky’s complete independence from Bluesky PBC—while staying interoperable with the rest of the network. Now, even if Bluesky's control tower goes down (this has happened several times), Blacksky would be fine.

• Graze community member Wanderling World has created and shared this awesome and easy to follow video tutorial about creating your own art feed. It's super simple, and walks you through everything from creating your Graze account, to finding and using a template. Check it out!

• We’ve been at betaworks Demo Day this week, talking about everything Graze. It’s been awesome to see the support for the work we’re doing.

  

Upgrades and Improvements:

• We’ve integrated the Custom Nodes right into the editor, you can now pick them right alongside Basic Nodes that you set up yourself:

  

• Ad runners can now increase the number of impressions they’re after while a campaign is running:

  

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 Ariel, creator of the video feed CatSky and Good Vibes feeds

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined during November when Twitter altered their terms of service. I hadn’t really been using the platform since 2019 though because I always got very stressed and overwhelmed by the negativity and politics. I’ve always been more an Instagram user too, so I didn’t really pickup using Bluesky until January when I participated in a Meta Blackout — not using Meta apps for a week. In that time I really learned enough about Bluesky to stick around. For me that was the combo of knowing apps like Flashes were on the horizon, the ability to customize my feeds, and the decentralized nature of it.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

My first feed was catsky videos - I serendipitously found Graze right before Bluesky released support for the video-only feed UI. Existing cat video feeds used the text timeline UI and had lots of videos without cats. So the Catsky Videos feedwas born to use the new video-only UI and reduce irrelevant content. All this happened because I like cats and cat videos and I wanted somewhere better than Instagram and Reddit to enjoy them.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

Feeds are a unique feature to Bluesky, so it’s hard to have one description to capture them.

Some feeds are common across social media - like the Following feed and Discover (“for you”) feeds. But Bluesky makes it possible to have, for example, multiple “discover” feeds by different feed operators (who are like content creators that ‘create’ a feed by curating Bluesky posts). I can use the discover feed from Bluesky, or choose to use a new (experimental) and customizable one by @jamesfuthey.com. You can also have multiple types of Following feeds - all posts except those about politics from people you follow, only pictures from people you follow, or something more complex like my Only Pics feed which combines people I follow, users from lists I created, and specific hashtags —then gets picture and politics free posts from them.

Some feeds are like subreddits - everyone can access it, but posts only show up if you intentionally go to the effort of posting there. This can be as simple as using a word or hashtag (like the BookSky feeds) or require getting on a user list AND using a hashtag (like the Science feed).

Other feeds are more like a saved advanced search. These use multiple inclusion and exclusion criteria to find content that fits the feed theme.

In short, I’d probably say feeds provide a way to focus on only the content you want to see when you want to see it.

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

My Good Vibes feed was created as a way to help people relax during trying times. The feed uses an open source machine learning model Graze has integrated into the feed builder that analyses the emotional and language sentiments (positive/negative) of a post.

While the feed isn’t necessarily building a community within it, I think it represents the broader openness and non-toxic environment we aim to create on Bluesky. And I hope it helps others find their communities, since it blending trending and new posts to give users a sense of the various communities already growing across the ATProtocol space. The lack of a personalized “algorithm” also provides a unique (and in this case, positive) opportunity to learn about communities users might not be aware of otherwise, which I hope spreads empathy and understanding of our shared humanness.

I am also working on setting up some PhD and grad school specific feeds to further build that community on Bluesky, but those feeds are still very much under construction. I’m awaiting some pending updates from Graze that I think will help reduce how overwhelming they would be otherwise.

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

One of my recent favorite bits of logic for a feed is requiring alt text on images, videos, gifs and links! I implemented this in the Good Vibes feed. I pull in posts with media from a curated list of accounts and hashtags. But then I only include those posts if they are accessible to everyone -- which is what makes the content truly good vibes. It makes use of a custom node "require alt text." Turns out making sure a post has alt text isn't just a one-node operation! It took a bit of testing and different logic to filter out different types of media/posts without alt text, while still allowing regular text post. The custom node allows you to set the minimum number of words needed in the alt text too. This lets feed builders who want high quality alt text to set a higher threshold, or lets them disable requiring alt text for select media types. Lastly, I'll add that I've tested this for non-English posts too so it's widely useable.

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.