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:

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:

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.