Leonid Meteor Shower over Niagara Falls (https://pdimagearchive.org/images/7b675a2c-abeb-42ce-b98f-3772e7b47a1b/)
Open Social is an invitation to rebuild the attention economy. We're joining Flipboard to take our biggest swing yet at it.
I've spent my whole professional life thinking about what it means to be online — how it shapes us, how we shape it through our cultures, our institutions, and our code, and how, over the years, we've been backed into a version of that life that benefits only a thin slice of humanity. As online life has settled into being a load bearing pillar in all our lives, I can't think of more vital work than what we're trying to do at Graze.
The work itself is simple: we build tools to make running your own social algorithm easy. The wager is more profound. The algorithm is a platform's crown jewel, and has been wielded against many to serve a select few. We seek to diffuse that power so widely that no single entity wields it ever again - both as a moral cause, as well as a push towards a more efficient, more competitive attention economy that works better for everyone.
What began as a provocation on my blog has become the most important work I've done in my career. In 21 months, we've sent over 41 billion posts to 12 million people, and I'm more convinced than ever that we have the playbook for how to re-orient the attention economy, and start pulling us back out of the widening gyre. To take us to the next stage of that work, we're joining Flipboard.
Running a company is a lot more than just building a product and articulating a vision people believe in. More often than not, we found ourselves slowed down by being a small team wearing a half dozen hats we didn't know we needed at the start. As I got closer with Mike over the last year, I realized that much of that was duplicative of the hard work Flipboard had already done, and would take years we can't afford in order to seize the "open social" moment. It started to gel that working more closely together would help us move faster and multiply our effect by bringing the novel aspects of our work into Flipboard.
More than any other company, Flipboard sees the opportunity open social presents, and has been investing heavily. Mike and I share a vision of creating an attention economy that works for everyone, and as the onslaught of generative AI starts to clog the pipes of legacy platforms, we both deeply believe that a curatorial role in shaping "the algorithm" is the only sustainable way to run that attention economy into the future.
Combined, we become two halves of one machine. Surf will be the browser for the open social web — where people go to read and discover feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS, and more. Graze will be the engine under those feeds — how a curator builds, tunes, and monetizes one without writing a line of code. Browse on one side, build and get paid on the other. And together, in joining forces, we serve tens of building atop open social protocols.
For our existing users and their readers: the mission is still the same, and our product is not going away – this change only expands our capacity as our team is able to fully commit to shipping the engine we need to transform the attention economy and make the promise of open social real. We started Graze to help build an attention economy without kings — a web where the people who do the work own it and get paid for it, and no single owner decides what everyone else sees. The protocols made that possible, and we're working to make it real.