Working to rebuild the web

Since we last wrote, the Graze team have been in Seattle at ATmosphere, the first in-person Bluesky conference. It was an optimistic and energizing time. Jay Graber, Bluesky CEO:

You can read coverage of the event here, and catch up on the talks here. We particularly loved Rudy Fraser’s talk about horseless carriage syndrome and how Bluesky is a skeuomorphism. Check it out.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Bluesky has made it easier to track referral traffic, reflecting their commitment to not de-promoting links and showing publishers that the traffic comes to their sites directly.

  “Market intelligence provider Similarweb noted that Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits in November 2024, spread across a variety of news websites, while Threads generated 24.5 million referrals. However, the firm pointed out that 42% of Threads’ traffic was directing users to its sister app, Instagram, not publishers’ websites.”

• Research from Altmetric shows that in March 2025, on most days, Bluesky hosts more posts linked to new research than X: “this suggests that Bluesky early adopters are ‘story starters’ rather than ‘propagators’.”

• Barack Obama has joined Bluesky.

Upgrades and Improvements:

We’ve made things even simpler for feed curators with the introduction of Custom Nodes. More than the ability to change color — you can define the logic of the node itself and share it.

A Custom Node can do anything that a normal node does with these added benefits:

• You can define the logic once, and then share that node (with yourself across your other feeds, or with other Grazers in the Fold).

• As a feed curator you can opt in to "auto updates" for a Custom Node’s logic, or selectively apply updates manually.

We’ve created a Custom Node showcase channel in the Discord where our early adopters are sharing their work. Come and check it out!

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 Derek creator of, among other things, the Bikesky feeds!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined on April 27, 2023 - a date that will live in Bluesky infamy. At the time I was hopping around different posting sites and finding I was getting pretty tired of all of them. There was a lot of hype around Bluesky at the time and I remember everyone was clamouring for an invite code. I was lucky enough to get one and it was obvious right away what the hype was about. It's a place that immediately felt fun, safe and like somewhere where people could be their authentic selves. 

What inspired you to make your first feed?

It was pretty simple: I wanted to find more people who are into biking. So I made a feed that scanned the entire network for posts that include bike-related keywords. And it worked like a charm. At first there were just a few of us using the feed, but because the feed was searching for people who talked about bikes, it would naturally find people who were posting things like "where are my bike people here?". One of us would reply recommending the Bikesky feed and it snowballed in this way. This continued to grow into what the Bikesky feeds are today.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

I usually ask people to imagine the timeline of an app that they use, and then ask them to imagine that they can swap that timeline with one that gives them whatever they want, or one that their friend made, or one that serves posts about a topic that they're interested in. And then I let them know that there are tens of thousands of these to pick from on Bluesky.

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

One non-bicycle related feed that I built that I'm really happy about is the Rice Cookers feed. I can't claim that it has built any kind of dominant community. But the thing about the Rice Cookers feed is: if someone is posting about a rice cooker, there's a 99% chance it's in praise of it. So the feed is this happy corner of Bluesky where everyone is celebrating their favorite appliance that sings a little tune when their food is ready. It's where I go when I need a guaranteed timeline cleanse:

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

I was really excited to launch a video feed on day 1 when Bluesky rolled out that feature - much thanks to Graze being quick to support this! It took a lot of fiddling, but I feel like I got some settings for Blend sorting that creates a feeling that is reminiscent of other popular video apps. You can see these settings in action the Bikesky: Clips feed:

What do you think is the future of social media?

I think we're turning a page on social media that is centrally controlled by one entity. We learned a lot from that era of social media - about the importance of trust, authenticity and community. I think decentralized social media is going to give rise to a lot of innovation that wasn't possible with centralized systems, and this will result in a lot of smaller communities being able to sustain themselves.

Try this:

Skywriter.blue is a beautiful new approach to the thread readers of old. Just paste the first post from a Bluesky thread and it will generate an easily shareable webpage of the thread.

I tried it out using an old thread of mine imported from Twitter, and it captured the archive date correctly, and brought across all of the images beautifully formatted:

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.