Welcome to the Fold

Welcome to the very first newsletter from the crew at Graze. We’re so excited to see how quickly this community has grown, and to witness the amazing things y’all are making with your custom feeds. We know that not everyone can hang out in the Discord all day (though we’d love to see you when you can), so this newsletter will keep you updated with the progress we’re making, the new features we’re introducing, and some of the cool stuff the Fold are up to.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• The Jetstream tops 1b posts!

• Graze is highlighted in TechCrunch.

• A new browser extension called Kyst lets you bookmark Bluesky posts.

Upgrades and Improvements:

We’re continuing to improve on Graze every day, in big and small ways. In the last two weeks we’ve:

• rewritten our help guides for new users, including great new guides on creating your first feed, and testing and fixing it so it works perfectly (hit us up if there’s a guide you’d like to see!)

• rolled out an entirely new core engine for algorithmic matching: Grazer, and open-sourced it

• sponsored the ATmosphere conference, an in-person event in Seattle focussed on ATProtocol in March 2025

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 to fema, the creator of the Urbanism+ feed!

When did you join Bluesky and why?
I joined pretty early on, under 70k users. I never used Twitter either, so I wasn't trying to escape that hellscape. Really, I think I just wanted to join something new and the idea of a more open social media appealed to me. 

What inspired you to make your first feed?
As an enjoyer of city building games like SimCity and Cities Skylines I would watch content on YouTube and eventually the algorithm led me to discover urbanist YouTube. Hardly anyone was talking about urbanism when I joined Bluesky and I really wanted to change that. I started reposting stuff from reddit and making my own funny posts, but creating a custom feed was really the thing I knew would connect us together. I don't take credit for the Urbanism scene, I think that would have happened without the feed, but I know it played a part in connecting people and continues to see lots of activity. A custom feed is nothing without great people posting great content so success is really dependent on everyone.

How do you explain feeds to other people?
They're kind of hard to explain because a custom feed can function vastly differently than another. Some function like an advanced search of matching posts, a collection of hashtags, a community of artists, a members only protected safe space for marginalized groups, a mutuals only experience, a collection of your personal best posts, a directory of feeds, or a list of pinned posts for which there are numerous applications. Custom moderation is also a huge W.

Tell us about the Urbanism+ feed.
This was intended to be very broad in scope, including urbanist content and adjacent topics. Bike lanes, sidewalks, density, public transit, climate as it relates to urban living, accessibility in cities for people with disabilities, housing, brilliant third places, etc. The feed was meant to be a starting point, with users finding more specific feeds to compliment Urbanism+. Shout out to BikeSky, run by the wonderful @derek.bike. This is the place to go if you want more bike content.

Show us a cool bit of logic from one of your feeds!
Behind the screens, I think the coolest trick is the implementation of a custom labeler. All users who receive a custom label have a synced user list (thanks to the wonderful script by @kris.to), which is then used for the feeds. Moderation lists too. Reported users are labeled, fed into a list from the script, and inputted as a block list. Cool stuff.

What do you think is the future of social media?
As a former myspace kid, I want it to go back to a time before the enshittification we're seeing today. Myspace wasn't perfect and it was missing a lot of the amenities we enjoy today, but it also wasn't bogged down by this level of targeted advertising and personal data concerns. You had the ability to customize your profile (for better or worse, often for worse...) and that was kind of incredible. Custom feeds, custom labelers, and more really make bluesky feel like a better social media is possible again. 

Try this:

Fema brings us this week’s cool trick, from the Urbanism+ feed:

“I've always been proud of the sticky posts. There's been several iterations with each bringing something new to the table that no other feed was doing (that I've seen). The current version uses markdown (thanks for the tip, Derek!) and also displays which feed version you're on based on which link is not live. This was accomplished by creating multiple sticky posts that look like this:

The pinned post on the trending feed, for example, has the link for trending removed and in brackets to signal to a user they're already on that page. Again, not an original idea but I haven't seen this implemented on a sticky post navigation workaround like this so I'm happy about it and I hope others copy it!”

Up Next:

The Graze crew are laser-focussed this week on getting ready to launch monetization! We’re really excited by our early tests, and we’re refining everything to make sure payments flow as expected. Our version of monetization flips the script on the way social media advertising has worked in the past.

We believe you should get rewarded for the hard work that you do building, maintaining and moderating a great custom feed. Our tools will put you in control, deciding what sponsored posts to accept, how often they’ll appear, and at what price point. And the best bit? You’ll take most of the revenue, and we’ll use the rest to keep improving everything that Graze does.

So now’s the time! If you’re building an awesome community through feeds, come and check out what we’re doing in the #monetization channel in the Discord. And we’ll have big news about our feed sponsorship system in the next newsletter. Forward this to someone you think will be keen!