Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds

The team at Bluesky has built another app – and this time it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that lets you design your own algorithm, create custom feeds and, one day, vibrate your own app.

At the Atmosphere conference last weekend, former Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, now Chief Innovation Officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazeepresented the AI ​​app for the first time, called Attie. Conference attendees will become the first beta testers for the new experience, which uses Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short).

“It’s a new product – it’s not part of the Bluesky app,” interim CEO Toni Schneider explained in an interview. (In addition to his role as CEO, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things within Bluesky: Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all that kind of stuff. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one built by Jay’s new team.”

With Attie, anyone can build their own custom feed by simply typing commands in natural language, just as if they were chatting with another AI chatbot. To use the app, people must log in with their Atmosphere login (that is, their login for any app running on atproto, including Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you’re talking about, what kinds of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the broader ecosystem are open systems that share data between apps.

You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you’d like to see or repost, and you can use the app to build your own custom feed, personalized just for you.

“You manage it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” says Schneider. “It’s the start of ensuring that many more people can build on top of the atmosphere.”

Furthermore, he adds, “It’s an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very human-centric… We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure we use it to build things that really benefit people.”

At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or another atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie’s users to vibrate their own social apps and build tools for other people.

Schneider says Graber and her team started working on the app a few months ago, around the same time she decided to return to construction, rather than running the company.

“I think she realized that she wanted to build so much more, and just being a CEO kept her busy, and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “The more time she spent, [and] was released, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She is a great leader and visionary, and we want her to build more things and not have to worry about running the business,” he says.

Graber says that today AI is being used by the big platforms to serve themselves, and not their users, by trying to increase the time people spend in their apps, collect data and control their algorithms.

“We believe AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her Attie announcement. “An open protocol puts this power directly in the hands of the user. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want, and find signals in the noise.”

Graber’s decision to refocus on protocol and product was followed by the company announcing that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes the news will serve as a signal to the broader community that Bluesky is here to stay.

“It means we have over three years of runway, which is great. That means stability and safety for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider told TechCrunch. It also means the team at Bluesky has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, including adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users.

One thing Schneider assures us isn’t being worked on, however, is any crypto integration – despite the financial backing of multiple crypto investors. That was something that worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be rife with crypto scams or become a payment tool.

“It’s the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they invested in things that were built on the blockchain and that were super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is decentralized social, so it suits those who are invested in believing in the platform and the opportunities of the ecosystem.”

Instead, the company can experiment with other ways to generate revenue. The team hasn’t decided yet whether Attie will eventually charge a fee, as it’s just a private beta for now. Other ideas being discussed include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol.

Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere in this way similar to WordPress.

“In the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anyone can participate,” he says. “You can have all these independent, decentralized parts working together. With WordPress, that turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars – now more than ten billion dollars a year – flowing through it.”

Schneider continues, “So it’s become very big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we’re hoping for: that Atmosphere will have a similar ability for a lot of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”