Bluesky Report – #112

The main news of this week is about the Turkish government pressuring Bluesky to hide accounts by political dissidents on the network. Yesterday I published an article about the situation, and how geographic-based moderation works on Bluesky. The other news of this week is that custom feed builder Graze raised 1M USD, and a new fork of the Bluesky app.

Graze raises 1 million USD

Custom feed builder Graze has raised 1 million USD in a pre-seed adventure round. Graze allows people to build their own custom feed, in a way that makes it accessible for non-coders. The platform also allows for feed builders to include ads into their feeds. The feature has been slowly rolling out recently, and feed operators are starting to use the advertisement options now. One example is the News Feeds by independent ATProto developer Ændra Rininsland, who recently shared plans at the ATmosphere Conference to reinvest the ad revenue back into the development of queer communities on ATProto. Graze is charging 1 dollar per 1000 impressions, a number the team expect to go up as Bluesky grows. Graze takes a 30% cut of this, which goes to hosting, payment processing and the development of the Graze platform. TechCrunch reports further on the revenue sharing:

“the team is considering doing a revenue share with Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying technology, the AT Protocol (ATProto). Today, Graze is working with other Bluesky ATProto-based apps, including photo and video apps like Skylight, Spark, and Flashes. “We’re very interested in figuring out what is the ethical revenue sharing model that helps everyone involved in the picture, including app developers,” said Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke.”

Meanwhile, Graze is working further on making their feeds accessible outside of Bluesky as well, their latest update allows feeds to be embedded on any web page.

In last week’s update, I reflected on comments by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about Bluesky’s monetisation plans. Graber mentions marketplaces and subscriptions as the main plans for how Bluesky plans to make money. When it comes to marketplaces, Graber’s example is about Blacksky, where Graber imagines that people can subscribe to feeds and that Bluesky will take a cut of the transaction. Last week I already went about how that does not seem to line up well with the direction that Blacksky is taking. But Graze raising 1 million to build their own business also shows that the marketplace for feeds might just happen outside of Bluesky PBC instead.

In Other News

Deer is a new client for Bluesky, and it is a fork of the official Bluesky app. What stands out about Deer is it focuses on some specific design choices that Bluesky has made, and giving users the ability to take different choices. For example, Deer allows people to turn various Bluesky features off, such as the go.bsky.app redirect, show posts where two other people have blocked each other (undoing the ‘nuclear block’), or remove the geographic moderation labelers.

An academic paper on Starter Packs: ‘Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs‘. The paper shows how big the impact of Starter Packs on the Bluesky network has been. The authors write: “Their impact [of Starter Packs] on the social graph increases over time surpassing 40 % of all the follow operations in December 2024. […] This represents a remarkable 19.95 % of all follow edges of the network, indicating a large impact of starter packs on the overall social graph. Follows resulting from starter packs are also long-lasting: we observe that by the end of 2024, 93.82 % of them are still present.”

Bluesky PBC is hiring for another two positions: a Senior Communications Manager and Developer Relations.

Newsletter platform Ghost has been working on an ActivityPub integration, allowing newsletters to show up in the fediverse. Combined with the Bridgy Fed, the connector software that allows posts to travel between the fediverse and the ATmosphere, posts from Ghost could already show up on Bluesky, but this can be a finicky process. Ghost is working on making this easier, with a simple one-click button to connect Ghost sites to Bluesky.

Stream.place is a video streaming platform that integrates with ATProto. It is grown out of the Livepeer ecosystem, a crypto DAO that focuses on livestreaming and video decoding. Stream.place has asked the Livepeer DAO for a grant of ~390k USD, with the DAO now voting on the proposal.

Some more ways and tools to interact with feeds this week. Summarising your Bluesky following feed via an LLM, with an MCP server. Transparant.se is building a Discover/For You type of algorithmic feed that is customisable. 777Bluesky gives 10 trending posts in audio format.

Bluesky PBC will apply stricter moderation to the usage of list as a vector for harrassment.

Bluecast is an audio room platform on ATProto, that mainly caters towards the Japanese community. Their latest update allows for recordings to be converted into 3minute videos and to be posted on Bluesky.

Tangled is a git collaboration platform on ATProto. In their latest blog post Tangled shares how they are building their own pull request system.

A scientific article on how to use Bluesky and Instagram for science professionals, in the Fisheries journal.

The International Journalism Festival held a panel called ‘Breaking on Bluesky: live news in a post-Twitter era’, with Emily Liu from Bluesky and Sarah Jeong from The Verge. The session can be rewatched here.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

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