Inspired by this blog post from Nick Heer, I took a closer look at Grain and also Flashes. I’ve prototyped support for Grain in Micro.blog and will ship it today. Flashes mostly piggybacks on existing Bluesky lexicon, so doesn’t really need special support from what I can tell.

@manton I’ve been using Flashes for a while and it does a great job just grabbing photos from the Bluesky feed. The only problem is that I need to follow more photographers on Bluesky…

@manton Yay!

@bobwertz I should do the same thing. And a related question for some people is why not isolate the photographers to a separate timeline, but I don’t think there’s one approach that would work for everyone.

@manton With my main following timeline, a lot of memes and screenshots get mixed in with photos…

@bobwertz Yeah, in Sunlit we tried to filter out PNGs and GIFs, which helps. Long-term there should probably be an AI “is this actually a photo” check. I personally don’t want screenshots in a photo app.

@manton For what it’s worth, micro.blog/discover/… feels like it could use some love. Not sure whether that’s a hand-curated feed or just doing a poor job of finding photos, but I personally find it unhelpful.

@ffmike Thanks, you’re right. I think some posts are leaking into that view that shouldn’t be. It’s a mix of automatic and hand-curated, and we don’t currently give it enough attention.

@jkratz Yes, she’s doing great work… My fault for not prioritizing the photos section specifically.

@manton I’m surprised to see Grain support added for such a nascent service.

@numericcitizen Fair, although I think there’s value in having another AT Proto destination in Micro.blog. Helps think about it as a platform and not “just” Bluesky.

@manton oh, this is very compelling.