Context is King

We’ve been doing a crazy amount of work under the hood here at Graze. This week we rolled out a major update, fundamentally re-working of our internal infrastructure from the ground up. This re-working makes our system much more streamlined while adding some outstanding new features. What this means for you:

Missing posts should be a thing of the past - it should be extremely rare for us to ever miss a post in your feed again.

Time-to-feed is faster! We were able to double the speed of getting posts from the jetstream over to your feeds.

Graze is now on the turbostream - that means we’ve been able to do something incredible with attributes. Read all about it below!

This lays the groundwork for us to do long-term backfilling - as in days or weeks. That'll be coming soon.

We’re so excited to be continually raising the bar on what’s possible with feeds. Come and join us!

What’s Happening in the Fold:

Bluesky has rolled out a private bookmarks feature , which means you no longer need to see all those 📌 in your replies! Plus there’s a great tool to convert those pins to bookmarks.

It’s official, science research gets more engagement on Bluesky : “Andrew Thaler, a deep sea biologist with 38,000 Bluesky followers, said: “The community is platform agnostic, they really don’t care what platform you are on. What matters is where the people are. So it was about making sure people moved over and the community continued to flourish. Science on Bluesky is kind of the best part of Bluesky. A smaller social network is not necessarily a negative. The engagement is tremendous.”

We loved this article about why Bluesky is the place for NFL fans . “The short answer: Mina Kimes. OK not really, but also kinda really. There are few people, if any, in NFL media circles more powerful and respected than Kimes. She straddles a few different worlds — a highly paid analyst on ESPN, a film-driven tape nerd, an NFL podcast host, and a Very Online ball-knower who makes jokes about the game. That's the kind of resume that can get lots of NFL folks to migrate to Bluesky and Kimes seemingly took that job seriously. She had a whole thread of all the folks she recruited to the app.”

Upgrades and Improvements:

This week we’ve launched an absolute gamechanging upgrade to add context to your feeds. Graze now lets feed builders filter content based on quote posts, parent posts, author & mentioned user metadata, and text transcriptions from videos!

We’re already seeing our feed builders using this in awesome ways. For example, scanning profiles where user bios explicitly declare affiliation (e.g. "I'm in medical residency", "I'm a PhD student" etc), or scanning for names of institutions ("XYZ @ ESPN"). Audio transcriptions are also huge for sports and other video feeds, allowing them to filter content that otherwise would have been opa.

We have a thread running of some of the first examples — check it out here !

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 Robert Howe ( @rchowe ), part of the Graze team rolling out all these incredible upgrades.

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined in November 2024 when a lot of the people that I follow on Twitter were leaving. I already had eclectic interests on Twitter, and I feel like the people on Bluesky probably fit that general interest more. I don't post much, but when I open Bluesky I see posts about cats, politics, tech, and airplanes.

What inspired you to make your first feed?

I made my first feed as a software developer working on Graze's feed generation code! It looks for pictures of cats named Buffy.

How do you explain feeds to other people?

You know how Facebook and TikTok have "the algorithm" that recommends what it thinks you like? Sometimes the recommendations are really weird? It's become normalized that we just expect that a megacorporation's faceless algorithm gets to decide what we see on our phones. Feeds are the way that we choose what we see on our own phones. I want to see cat pictures, so I subscribe to a feed made by someone else who likes cats. I want to keep up with my friends from high school, so I made a feed of just their content. Sometimes I want to not think about politics, so I filter that out.

What do you think is the future of social media?

People are going to realize that most mainstream social media isn't actually "social," it's just a carousel of content from influencers and organizations with ulterior motives. People are going to get sick of that soma and want to talk to their friends, meet people with similar interests, and put some creative expression into the world for no reason besides the joy of making something new.