Grain.social is a photo social network built on the AT Protocol. Today I’ve added following users and cross-posting from your blog to Grain.
When you follow a Bluesky user in Micro.blog by searching for their handle, like username.bsky.social, we now aggregate both their Bluesky posts and their Grain photo galleries together in the timeline.
Micro.blog is a universal social timeline. Follow users on the fediverse, atmosphere, and blogs so you see all their posts in one place.
The other side of this is automatic cross-posting to Grain, similar to our cross-posting to Pixelfed. When a blog post contains photos, Micro.blog can publish them as a photo gallery for Grain users.
You’ll see “Add Grain” as an option on the Sources page if you already have Bluesky enabled. We simply reuse the existing authorization.
Why Grain.social now? More platforms appear to be building on one of the atmosphere’s unique features: storing custom data formats in your account, tied to an identity that is shared across apps. Micro.blog now supports three of those collections: Bluesky’s microblogging service, Standard.site, and Grain.social. I expect in the future there will be a suite of tools enabled by your Bluesky account.
This specific Grain support is a little bleeding-edge. There are some questions I didn’t attempt to answer yet, such as whether replies to photo galleries should go back to Bluesky or Grain.
Whenever a new photo social network pops up, you could move to that network, or you could just post your photos to your own blog and never have to change your workflow again. I’ve said before that the blog photos page is one of my favorite things.
