Another massive milestone for the Bluesky ecosystem with 40m users now on board!

With so many users, the health of conversations becomes so important. Bluesky is testing some new changes to improve the health of conversations online, including concepts of social proximity and toxicity detection. You can read more about it in Bluesky’s announcement here. It’s awesome to see a continued focus on improvement, and we love the neighborhood focus of these changes — making our online experience feel more like spending time at the local dog park, music venue, or the farmers’ market, rather than enormous, cold, crowded, noisy spaces.

And speaking of community, we have an absolutely amazing group of people in our Discord, who go the extra mile for new feed builders and for people bringing their feeds across. Don’t be deterred! Whatever it is you want to make, we’re here to help.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

• Heron, a graceful new ATProto client is now in open beta! We love seeing all the amazing new ways to consume the feeds that are starting to be developed.

• We’ve been starting to use our beautiful brand illustration in all sorts of ways, and so we built this cute internal tool to chop it up, which you can now use to make your own feed avatars!

• We’ve given our users a brand new and very useful filter to reduce any spam content in their feed!

  

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 Tynan Purdy, and you can check out his work here.

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined Bluesky late in the invite phase but right in the thick of twitter alternatives. I was on threads, mastodon, t2, all of them, just to see what might be the next big place. Threads seemed the most compelling as it was going to get all the users and promised activitypub integration. As I learned more about what Bluesky really was and the AT Protocol, I was initially skeptical. Why is there another protocol by a private company? But I realized how it made different technical choices that allow for a whole new paradigm of social software that AP wasn’t anywhere close to, I went all in. Haven’t posted on threads or activity pub in months. The feeds connected me with an amazing community (shoutout Cameron Pfiffer’s Atmosphere feed). I haven’t looked back.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

I was on the train headed to the New York hack day that we had in July saw that Bailey and some other people were bummed that they couldn’t make it and would try to keep up with the live stream. Sharpie had made that hashtag earlier in the day, so I figured it would be easy enough to make a feed so that people not at the event can keep up with what was happening. So I put together a simple feed that just pulled in the hashtag and anything from all of the attendees which was why I asked the team if there was any way for smoke signal events to automatically generate a list of attendees that could be used in a graze feed (still waiting on that by the way, Nick).

How do you explain feeds to other people?

It is completely ridiculous that we, a bunch of grown ass adults, allow four or five uppity billionaire dickheads to control what we see online. Imagine Elon Musk standing on your front porch, personally screening all of the newspapers before they make it to your stoop. It’s infantilizing. Because AT Proto data is all public, there is no monopolistic control over how to get access to people’s posts from a centralized entity. They can’t do anything to stop anybody from gathering post and providing a stream of them with a particular set of rules. that’s feeds.

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

One that I’ve been proud of recently is the act Proto ideas feed. I have tons of ideas for things to do with the protocol and it’s many unique affordances. Others due to. And there is a channel in the discord for showing off your idea so others can steal it or rip on it but that’s a bit secluded away and I wanted something on protocol and more automatic. That feed pulls in anybody talking about an idea they have for AT Proto or using the hashtag #atprotoidea. A week or so after I made that feed, the discourse really started going off. I had to adapt and add some negative filtering and remove a bunch of posts that were not about ideas to expand on the protocol but heckling people who they thought had no idea how to run a social network.

What do you think is the future of social media?

Right now with five people controlling the speech and media diet of billions of people we get news headlines about Instagram changing their algorithm to show you more people you don’t follow or whole conferences about how to succeed within the YouTube algorithm. That all goes away people individually choose what they want to see and have full control over the rules that determine what shows up in their feed. Creators and publishers simply have to make a good and well described product and it will make it to the people who want it. I’m curious to see whether the open social web will get big enough that the incumbents are forced to join it or die before they get the chance.

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.