Another newsletter, another Graze Grant recipient! This week we’re delighted to announce we’re backing Party Starter, by @partystarter.bsky.social. It’s a joyful toolkit for creating short-lived, location-aware events. Think spontaneous dance parties, synced music moments, or hyperlocal games, all sparked by geodata and open social graphs.

Built by a multidisciplinary team from TU Dresden, Party Starter brings new energy to the decentralized web, especially in museums, workshops, and research communities exploring digital commons and protocol-based governance.

They’re also working on a paper for Weizenbaum Conference 2025 on how community-owned infrastructure can be democratic by design.

This is what Graze is all about: seeding experiments that make the web more expressive, sovereign, and fun.

We’re just getting started. If you’re working on something weird and wonderful—we want to hear from you. Apply by June 30th.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Bluesky has rolled out a new version of its app with a sweet new Share button!

• For a great example of how Feeds can be super-useful in real time, check out the LA vs ICE feed from @zombiegomoan.

• Rudy Fraser is raising funds to support a soft fork of the Bluesky app for the Blacksky community. This is an awesome example of the power of ATproto and the ability for communities to create vibrant healthy spaces for themselves! Contribute here.

• We’re sponsoring some drinks at the first ever London ATProto meetup! Get along and meet some other people committed to the future of the social web.

Upgrades and Improvements:

• We’ve now given advertisers the ability to add posts to an active campaign. The feed curator will still need to approve the post before it goes live.

• Even more magic, you can now set an order for your sticky posts! This lets you keep the admin at the top of your feed nice and tidy, and remember you can set these 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 @dame.is who has been going deep on a range of awesome ATProto projects and custom feeds!

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined at exactly 8:44:40 AM Eastern Time on March 2, 2023, so I've been on the network over 2 years now. I think I'm account number 1,216. I was a heavy Twitter user sad about the decline of the platform I knew and loved, so I was eagerly awaiting the launch of Bluesky. I sent a DM to Jay Graber and she graciously gave me an invite code.

I had been working in decentralized technology for several years at that point and had been underwhelmed with the other attempts at decentralized social networks, especially those built atop blockchains such as Farcaster, Nostr, and Lens. At the time of Bluesky's early release, I was working at IPFS which created some of the technology that Bluesky relies upon like CIDs and CAR files, so I was already familiar with a lot of the technical concepts they were experimenting with. The potential of what the team was building was (and still is) exciting to me.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

For years I thought it would be really cool if you could easily "see through the eyes" of any other social network user. As in, see the feed/timeline as they experience it, because we all have a different social graph. I tried Graze as soon as it launched and was delighted to see that one of the modules made creating such a feed easy and instantaneous. I even posted about it which got shared quite a bit and kicked off some interesting debate about the ethics of such a feature.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

They're powerful curation and filtering tools that are kind of like LEGO. You have all these pieces that you can connect together in thousands of combinations to get different results. I like to show people some of the interesting feeds I've made or subscribe to in order to give them a sense for what's possible. One example I give is my "Silence" feed that only displays null posts containing no data.

Or my are.na community feed which is only content from people who use the social curation platform called are.na.

Or my "Nuanced AI Commentary" feed.

We’ve linked to your fab ATProto projects a bunch— and you’ve gone deep on making lexicons comprehensible to the rest of us — tell us a bit more about what you’ve been building (e.g. cred blue, the bathroom, atpotato) and why?

A lot of the projects I've created the first half of 2025 have been excuses to do a deep dive on one particular element of the AT Protocol. In the case of cred.blue, I was gaining a deep understanding of all the types of public data that are out there for each account on the network. With Flushes, I was learning how to make my own AppView and custom lexicon. And then atpota.to is basically an umbrella brand that contains all of the Bluesky/ATProto projects I make. The goal with it is to have a vessel by which I could potentially create my own software company or allow my projects to extend beyond just my personal identity.

At the moment I'm in the planning stages for several different Bluesky/ATProto apps and services. I want to choose one concept and focus on it deeply for many months so that I can create something truly high quality that people would be willing to pay for. I'm exploring several ideas for fun social apps and even atproto clients.

What do you think is the future of social media?

Across the term I fully believe that decentralization is the future. 100%, without a single doubt in my mind. Short term, I think it looks like a platform that gives people access to broadcasting and narrowcasting. Bluesky has the broadcasting side of things down, but they're very lacking in the narrowcasting department and seem to be working on a solution. One of the current biggest problems with social networks is that they focus too narrowly on either doing broadcasting OR narrowcasting, and I think we really need the best of both worlds.

Long term, I think we're going to see a dramatic increase in niche social experiences that don't scale to the global population (think Flushes.app, but more serious or less of a joke). The AT Protocol allows anyone to relatively quickly launch a social experience that is frictionless for people to use thanks to the existing social graph that is immediately compatible.

I also deeply believe that we need to see a cambrian explosion of client interfaces. I want a world in which the AT Protocol is being consumed and interacted with by hundreds or thousands of clients rather than just a handful. We need to abandon the legacy notion of a one-size-fits-all client interface that has predominated the first two decades of social media's history. It does not make sense for 3 billion people across thousands of cultures to all consume the same social network (Facebook) through the exact same app. Client interfaces need to be more tailored to specific populations, specific interests, and distinct use-cases.

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.