Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for creating personalized feeds

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

At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, former Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee presented the AI ​​application, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create a proxy social app built on top of Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short).

“It’s a new product — it’s not part of the Bluesky app,” explains interim CEO Tony Schneider in an interview. (In addition to his role as CEO, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky’s backer, True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things within Bluesky — starter packs, custom feeds, all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first product built by Jay’s new team.”

With Attie, anyone will be able to create their own custom feed just by typing commands in natural language, just as if they were talking to any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will log in using their Atmosphere login information (meaning logging in to any app running atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will instantly understand what you’re talking about, what kind of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the broader ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps.

You can ask Attie questions, such as posts you might want to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own personalized feed.

“You can control it, shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” Schneider says. “It’s the beginning of enabling more people to build on top of the atmosphere.”

Additionally, he adds: “It’s an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused… We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure we’re using it to build things that really benefit people.”

Upon launch, Attie can be used to create and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie users to code their own social apps as well as create tools for other people.

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

“I think she realized there was a lot she wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept her busy, and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she spent more time, [and] She’s liberated, I think it’s becoming clear that this is her happy place. She’s a great leader and visionary, and we want her to build more things and not worry about running the company.

Today, Graber says, big platforms are using AI to serve themselves, 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 announcing Atty. “The open protocol puts this power directly in the hands of users. You can use it to create your own feeds, build software that works the way you want, and find the signal in the noise.”

Graber’s decision to focus back on the protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that it now has an additional $100 million in funding from the round it closed last year. The team hopes the news will be a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to exist.

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

However, one thing Schneider assures us is not in the works, which is any cryptocurrency integration – despite financial support from many cryptocurrency investors. This worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app was rife with cryptocurrency scams or could become a payment tool.

“They were the type of investors who were attracted to cryptocurrencies because of their decentralization, and they were investing in things built on blockchain that were very decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s cryptocurrency backers. “This is a decentralized social system, so it suits those who have invested in believing in the platform and ecosystem opportunity.”

Alternatively, the company may try other means of generating income. The team has not yet decided whether Attie will eventually require a fee, as it is just a private beta at the moment. 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 the WordPress.com publishing platform, sees Atmosphere’s capabilities similar to WordPress in this way.

“In the middle [the Atmosphere] “It’s a completely open system, so anyone can participate.” “You can have all these independent, decentralized parts working together. With WordPress, that has turned into a huge ecosystem through which billions of dollars flow — more than $10 billion a year now.

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