How I've been using custom feeds for organizing in the ATmosphere

Last updated: August 27.

As I've been experimenting with different tactics and technologies for organizing in the ATmosphere, I've been using custom feeds in four separate ways:

Unfiltered feeds like Flock and other ALPRs, KOSA/Bad Internet Bills, and Surveillance Pricing track almost all the discussion about a topics, so are great for people deeply involved enough in the organizing that they want to see everything that's going on. The feeds I've created use simple logic involve keywords, hashtags, and regular expressions, with a few especially loud or spammy posters filtered out.

Filtered or curated feeds, like Flock/ALPRs curated, KOSA/KIDS Act (curated), and Fight for the Future's Bad Internet Bills. These are much quieter so better for "everyday activists" who may not have the time or interest to wallow in the all the information. Flock/ALPRs curated, for example, combines the keyword, hashtag, and regular experession matching from the uncurated feed with a limitation to only include posts from accounts on the Tech justice / digital rights / privacy / etc orgs (US) and Digital Rights / Tech Justice Media + Journalists lists as well as Say no to Flock, Axon, and other ALPRs. Graze.social's support for lists and starter packs makes this fairly easy,

Geographically-focused feeds like Washington Privacy Organizers' Seattle Fair Pricing, is a subset of the overall Surveillance Pricing feed limited to posts that mention Seattle or are from lists of Seattle-area organizers, politicians, and journalists. There's probably a cleverer way to do this, but for now I'm just going with what works elsewhere and using keywords, regexes, and lists.

"Trending" feeds, which are algorithmic versions of the above. To be honest, my results from these haven't been great yet, so I'm not linking to any examples, but there are scenarios where these could potentially be very useful

As simple as the first three categories of feeds are, they're ridiculously useful. With ALPRs, for example, the curated feed features a steady stream of relevant articles as well as updates about victories and activism campaigns in various cities; the uncrated feed is a lot noisier, with plenty of random jokes or snarky remarks to politicians about Flock cameras, but also has a lot of posts from people who are just finding out about the issue so might well be interested in getting involved. And on all these topics, whenever I've done a compare-and-contrast with other platforms, the feeds have relevant results that aren't showing up in searches on Xitter, Instagram, Google News, or Reddit.

I've been using graze.social, which doesn't require any coding and (unlike some of the other alternatives I looked it) it's powerful enough to support all of these scenarios. It also supports custom nodes, which make it easier to maintain multiple related feeds.

There's certainly room for improvement; custom nodes are a bit klunky, and filtered feeds, could be a lot richer if with even simple mechanisms for collaborative curation of feeds (for example, "include all posts liked or boosted by this list of accounts"). Still, none of these issues are show-stoppers for the kinds of organizing I've been doing so far, and with Graze's recent acquisition by Flipboard, with luck we'll see some rapid progress here. And if these limitations turn out to be too problematic for particular use cases, Bluesky's custom-feed template and tutorial is easy enough to tweak if you've got basic Typescript programming skills (and a machine to host it on), so hand-rolling a custom-purpose with additional functionality is an alternative – something you can't do on most centralized platforms today.

One caveat worth highlighting: feed discovery remains a huge challenge. How are people interested these causes supposed to find these feeds? Good question. No matter how good the content on these feeds is, the current reality is that very few people are actually using them. So until we find ways to get better visibility and/or broader adoption, the value of these feeds is likely to be limited to situations where they're useful to an organizing team and volunteers who go through onboarding that includes learning about key feeds. Once again, though, this is a limitation not a show-stopper, and it's another area where rapid short-term progress may well be possible.