Graze For Communities

While custom feeds can be awesome to improve your own social media experience, they are also a fantastic way to build and grow communities. Let's look at some ways that Graze can help.

Sticky Posts

Once you've created your community feed, one of the simplest ways to start to build it is through using Sticky and Rotating Posts.

These posts can set the ground rules for your community, give members information, and promote other feeds they might be interested in.

We have a full guide to setting up Sticky and Rotating Posts here. If you run several community feeds, a Sticky Set lets you keep the same notices on all of them and edit them in one place.

Member Opt In

You can use a Social Graph node to include all posts in your feed from members who have opted in to your community. To do that, set up a Bluesky account for your members to follow. Then add a Social Graph node set to Include, enter that account's username, and choose followers, so posts from everyone who follows the account are included.

You can then advertise to your community that it is opt-in by using a Sticky Post, the way that the Bikesky feed does here:

Subscriber Lists

You can also make your community more private if need be, by making the feed readable only by people on a membership list. See Subscription Lists.

Run it together

Community feeds are easier with help. You can invite Collaborators to help run your feed, choosing what each person is allowed to do. Collaborators you allow to suggest posts can put them forward, and their suggestions land on your Curation Desk for someone to accept or turn down.

Orientation Threads

One of the ways feed curators help new members out is by posting (and regularly linking to) an orientation thread. This is a bit like the oldest of community FAQs and it's a great way to onboard new members. Here's @trezy.codes orientation thread for GameDev:

Directories

You can also make discovery easier for your members by creating easily shareable posts and threads on Bluesky that contain links to your communities. For example, here's the main Booksky directory, maintained by @clarabelle.xyz

Landing Pages

Sometimes the constraints of a post or thread will be too restrictive, and you'll want to provide your community with more information. One way to do that is to create a community landing page, and then link to that from a pinned post.

For example, @youronly.one has created a range of feeds for the Filipino community, and has made a landing page using Whitewind:

There are lots of services that will let you create simple, beautiful landing pages for your community, like mmm.page and Carrd.

Custom Handles

Bluesky lets you change your handle to a custom domain. Over time, you might want to use custom handles to signal that certain accounts are associated with your community. You can do that yourself if you own the domain, or use third-party services for Bluesky like Aviary or Handles Club.