Welcome to the new Graze

If you’ve been on the site this week, you’ll have noticed that we’ve launched a full visual rebrand of Graze Social. This has been a long time in the works, and we’re so excited to share it with you all! We’re particularly delighted by the beautiful illustration that sits at the heart of it all. Make sure you read the story behind it (and pick your fave lil character!) and let us know what you think.

Under the hood, we’re ambitiously pursuing the same goal as ever: giving developers, creators, and communities the tools to build and own custom algorithms on ATProto — no code required, no platform gatekeeping your reach. While legacy platforms crumble under central control, we're building the infrastructure for what comes next.

New look, same mission: own your algorithm.

What’s Happening in the Fold:

In keeping with its open mission, Bluesky has adopted a patent non-aggression pledge.

Bluesky develops open protocols, and we want everybody to feel confident building on them. We have released our software SDKs and reference implementations under Open Source licenses, but those licenses don’t cover everything. To provide additional assurance around patent rights, we are making a non-aggression pledge.

We loved this long, clear, easy to understand explanation of what’s great about ATProto from Dan Abramov .

If you’re a social power-user, and you’ve been missing some of the tools you could use in the old place, you’ll be pleased to know Hootsuite has now integrated Bluesky!

We’re not the only site with a glow-up! Check out how great Blacksky is looking now.

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 with our CEO Devin Gaffney ! Nothing like interviewing the boss.

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined in April of 2023! I joined because I had known about the project since wayyyy back when it was announced and April '23 was the first moment I could get my hands on an invite. I didn't hang out all that much on the platform until mid 2024 though.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

I got excited about the possibility of custom feeds the first time I read about them in the API. I saw that Bluesky was hiring for an algorithm engineer in late 2024 and got to thinking: "what would an algorithm engineer at bluesky do? What is their goal with this thing?" and after an afternoon of sitting with it, it all came into focus. I could see quite clearly the goal of using custom feeds as the wedge for allowing anyone to own their own slice of the attention economy, to level the playing field of the attention economy so anyone could participate. I took it as a provocation to think about how we could rebuild that side of social media in the image of a decentralized social media, got to programming, and the rest is history!

How do you explain feeds to other people?

On Bluesky (and ATProto platforms generally), you're thrown in with some default feeds, just like any other social media app. The crucial difference is when you're on other platforms, you're stuck with whatever they gave you — here, in ATProtoland, if you don't like it, you can replace it with your own vision of how the worlds information should be organized! Crucially, you can share that vision with the world too - if you have a better idea of how to sort out the flood of content every day, you get to test it in the real world with real people. That's an extremely powerful tool, and allows us all to explore what the next generation of social media could be, free of people deciding everything for us.

What do you think is the future of social media?

I think the future of social media looks a lot less like siloed apps and a lot more like ordinary websites — an open system where you have browsers that are interchangeable, different ways of perhaps experiencing the stream of content, but no more silos where you have to live inside the four walls of any particular company to experience it. This is sort of (and I'm dating myself) an AOL -> Navigator moment I think!

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.