We're making headlines!

Today, we achieved a major milestone in advancing our mission to empower users to create and manage their own social media feeds on Bluesky - taking back control from algorithm-driven gatekeeping and putting the users back in charge. The future of social media is about transparency, choice, and giving people the power to shape their own experience. Thank you to Sarah Perez for a fantastic story in TechCrunch and to our key investors at betaworks and Salesforce Ventures, Factorial, Apertu Capital, Peter Wang, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs for believing in us!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• We’ve written up a great post about how Tyler Fisher and Ændra Rininsland worked together on a sponsored feed, and how monetization is being built on Graze for a better future of the social web.

• Does the infrastructure underpinning Bluesky make your eyes glaze over a little bit? We’re fans of this piece Steve Klabnik wrote last year, explaining in super simple terms how ATproto works.

• Jay Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, gave another great interview to On the Media about how we can reimagine social media (including a not-so-oblique reference to Graze about sponsored posts!)

• Bluesky was top of mind for journalists at the International Journalism Festival last week. A panel on Breaking News on Bluesky discussed how this is the first time that media organizations can own the relationship with their audiences via custom feeds. We are building out the tools that will unlock this !

Upgrades and Improvements:

• Folks have been making so many custom feeds and custom nodes that we needed to add a way to organize it all! You can now use tags to mark and organize everything under the roof.

  

• After a hiatus, Contrails are back and live! Track any Graze feed as a websocket endpoint drop-in replacement to the jetstream - in effect, you can now use Graze as a query engine against the full Bluesky firehose! Read more here.

• Sticky and rotating posts in a feed can now be set to expire!

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 Daniel, who goes by business goose online, creator of, among other things, the Fungi Friends feed!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined Bluesky in April 2023. It had become clear that Elon Musk was seriously starting to change Twitter and I wanted to see if this sort of upstart social media company could replace it. I had some inkling that it was decentralized or something but knew pretty little about what that meant.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

My feeds are usually made for myself. My first feed was one I built to aggregate mushroom photos (Fungi Friends). I had people use 📸🍄 in their posts, and I put the photos in the feed. Over time I broadened it a bit to include hashtags, which I regret a little because I think it looks cluttered, but at least I get to see cool photos of mushrooms!

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I tell people that feeds are just like alternate timelines. For a while I didn’t really see the appeal of them that much actually, and just used Fungi Friends as a sort of palate cleanser from bad vibes online, but slowly I got more interested in curating my own algorithms.

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

Fungi Friends is easily my most popular feed, and the only one that is used by anyone besides me. I think being early on the site meant that there was a lot of drama, and science/naturalist people wanted a place away from all that. I was surprised to see other people sharing the feed and using the tag in comments of mushroom photos that they’d seen. Generally Fungi Friends posts do pretty surprisingly well in terms of likes and stuff! Even obscure accounts get lots of likes and comments from the community, which is nice.

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

Here is a custom node that I use on some of my own feeds, which i call the "Vibe Protection Device". It codifies some of my preferences for a calmer feed, including setting sentiment thresholds, reducing News and Sports posts, and excluding quote dunks and replies:

What do you think is the future of social media?

I think the future of social media is something between Mastadon and Facebook: a social media that respects users and allows them to control their identity but has the power to see everything and give people robust social experiences. In short , I think the future is ATproto, though I can’t say for sure Bluesky itself will be the killer product in the long run.

Try this:

The business goose has shown off a cool custom node up above, and we have a brand new help guide so you can get started with using custom nodes yourself!

Custom nodes are super powerful — they let you create a piece of feed logic, and reuse it across multiple feeds. And, if you want to, you make your custom node public so that others can use it or remix it.

You can browse all the public custom nodes, and choose one for yourself. And you can opt in to auto updates, so that when the node creator improves the logic, your feed gets the benefit right away. We have a special channel in our Discord where you can come and showcase your Custom Nodes, or see what others have been working on.

Come and say hello:

We’re building a great community of Graze users supporting one another in our 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.