This week we’ve been listening to Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, talking to betakit about what it really means to build a better social platform from the ground up. He’s not just dealing with spam and moderation queues—he’s trying to help users unlearn the habits they picked up in the old algorithmic walled gardens. The key idea? Control. On Bluesky, that control sits with users—not a billionaire or a black-box algorithm, and not even the moderation team. That’s what makes custom feeds so powerful. Whether you want to follow breaking news, niche hobbies, or joyful community-led spaces, Graze lets you choose the feed that fits. You’re not stuck with someone else’s version of “what’s happening.”

It was striking to hear Aaron describe the shift he’s working toward: from users expecting someone else to curate their experience, to realizing they now have the tools to do it themselves. That’s the ethos Graze was built for. We’re here to help people find, share, and design the feeds they want—whether they’re curating by hand or remixing feeds that others have already crafted. Bluesky might still be early in its journey, but the infrastructure is already here for a better, user-first web. Let’s build it together!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• We loved this project to make a community playlist on Bluesky:

  

   

• Everything you need to know about Flashes, the Bluesky-based Instagram alternative that launched in the app store this week.

• Bluesky has introduced new, more granular notifications to fine-tune what activity your app alerts you to:

  

Upgrades and Improvements:

• As we mentioned last time, @blueskyfeeds.com has now shut down. To help make sure the feeds built on that platform survive we've implemented an automatic migration to our platform, and we've set our migration tool to work even after the shut down. If you know someone who has a feed hosted with @blueskyfeeds.com just send them across to graze.social to get started.

• We’ve talked before about how you can now connect your Patreon to a feed. Booksky has implemented this now to offer ad-free feeds to their Patreon members!

  

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 Del Winters, who has been using feeds to improve her personal experience online!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

Microblogging sites and me have a political history–I joined Twitter on November 4, 2008, and I left Twitter after the 2020 presidential primaries. Unsurprisingly, I joined Bluesky in October 2024 because I wanted to keep up with election news. I tried Threads first, but I found it too limited in configurability, the algorithm too sensitive, and the prospect of being ensnared in yet another Meta product too depressing. Several people I followed on Threads bailed for Bluesky, so I decided to try it out. Eight months later, and I’m happy with that decision. Bluesky’s configurability with feeds and lists and composable moderation give me the granular control I never had on Twitter or Threads. I’ve also made more friends on Bluesky than I ever did in twelve years of using Twitter.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

I first learned how to create feeds because I wanted to differentiate between the types of posts I bookmarked. I created a personal recipe feed that looked for any reply I made with the tomato soup can emoji, and I created a starter pack feed that looked for any reply I made with the rolodex emoji. I leveled up my feed complexity after a while because I wanted to easily find conversations about movies and shows I enjoyed. In March, I refined a feed about Mickey 17, the latest Bong Joon Ho movie, to show me trending posts of the last 24 hours with lots of replies. By April, I had learned a bit of Regex to use in three curated feeds about Andor, the Star Wars show. By monitoring the Andor feeds, I found great people to follow and a few really good essays I never would have seen by simply waiting for great posts to appear on my Following feed.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

Separating politics and non-politics discussion is crucial for a healthier approach to social media. At least once a week, some post goes viral on Bluesky by someone with a big platform about the difficulty of finding non-politics posts. As someone who uses Bluesky to keep up with politics, current events, and movies and books, I sympathize. I’ve encouraged these folks to try out my solution, which is to split my Following feed into politics and non-politics feeds using the Topic Analysis node in Graze. So far, I haven’t been too successful at getting people to try it out. Lots of people don’t believe me when I say creating feeds isn’t all that complicated for a non-expert, even when I give them a remixable Graze feed.

I also often tell people feeds can be an excellent way to share the most important news, the best posts, the funniest memes, and the most interesting conversations happening in your corner. I love a good niche interest like, say, sheep herding, but I don’t want to see every post from all 150 people in your sheep herding starter pack. I encourage people with expertise in specific areas to create feeds that highlight the best of the best. This could look like a feed where you manually insert the best posts about sustainable architecture every week, or a feed pulling from a list of twenty film photography enthusiasts filtered for posts with at least five replies, or a feed of reproductive rights journalists filtered for posts with at least ten reposts that include a link to a specific news outlet.

Here’s an example: This spring, I started writing for MovieJawn, a writer’s collective about movies based out of Philadelphia. I’m helping out with their Bluesky account, and the first thing I did was create a feed with our staff starter pack. MovieJawn Staff pulls in posts by the MovieJawn staffers, filters for posts about movies and pop culture, and ranks by engagement.

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

I have some newer feeds that I hope will take off and foster community! I recently created a long reads feed to highlight essays and articles longer than 2,000 words with a focus on smaller, independent outlets and blogs. I’m hoping to bring together a community of people who enjoy reading longer, in-depth writing and also to encourage outlets and independent writers to publish longer articles by showing an appetite for them.

As I said previously, I’ve split up my Following feeds into politics and non-politics posts, but there are other options! For example, my pop goes the skyline feed pulls in posts about pop culture from people on a few arts and entertainment lists or starter packs. I’m hoping this will encourage other people to post more about the things that bring them joy.

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

The logic for my feeds stays fairly simple because I am not any kind of computer whiz. I did find a Regex line for excluding posts with more than two hashtags, which was great for keeping spam out of the Andor feeds: ([#].+\n*){3,}

I can talk about some funny necessities of my feeds. I really like creating feeds with some whimsy, like my sephiroth posting feed that captures posts pointing out other people posting like Sephiroth. Of course, this meant I had to remove posts about Final Fantasy from a feed referencing a Final Fantasy character.

What do you think is the future of social media?

The future of social media is less social media. Social media should inform, energize, and connect you with people who share your interests. Social media should not be a black hole where you spend hours ingesting propaganda while searching for a signal in the endless noise. Bluesky and the ATProto are an opportunity to do social media differently, with fewer addictive features and less FOMO. Feeds are an excellent way to help people find the signal without doomscrolling through hours of noise.

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.