Bluesky launches Attie, an AI-powered app for building custom feeds

The Bluesky team has developed a new app — this time, it's not a social network but an AI assistant that lets you design your own algorithms, create custom feeds, and eventually, build your own app through vibe-coding.

At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber — now chief innovation officer — along with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, unveiled the AI app named Attie for the first time. Conference attendees will be the first beta testers of this new experience, which uses Anthropic’s Claude internally to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky's underlying AT Protocol (or atproto).

“It’s a new product — it’s not part of the Bluesky app,” explains interim CEO Toni Schneider in an interview. (In addition to his CEO role, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched many features inside Bluesky — Starter Packs, custom feeds, and so on. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one built by Jay’s new team.”

ScreenshotImage credit:Attie from Bluesky

With Attie, anyone can build their own custom feed simply by entering commands in natural language, just like chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people log in with their Atmosphere account (which works for any app built on atproto, including Bluesky). Attie will instantly understand what you've been discussing, your interests, and more, because Bluesky and the broader ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps.

You can ask Attie questions, such as which posts you might want to see or repost, and use the app to curate a custom feed personalized just for you.

“You control it, you shape it, without needing to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” Schneider says. “It’s the start of enabling many more people to build on top of the Atmosphere.”

Plus, he adds, “It is an AI product, but one that is very people-focused … We believe AI is a powerful technology, but we want to ensure we use it to build things that genuinely benefit people.”

ScreenshotImage credit:Attie from Bluesky

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

“I think she realized there was so much more she wanted to build, and the CEO role kept her too busy; she felt she needed more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she freed up more time, it became clear that this is her happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her to focus on building rather than running the company,” he says.

Graber says that today, major platforms use AI to serve themselves rather than their users, by trying to increase the time people spend in their apps, harvesting data, and controlling algorithms.

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

Graber’s decision to once again focus on protocol and product came alongside the company’s announcement that it has secured $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes this news signals to the wider community that Bluesky is here to stay.

“It means we have over three years of runway, which is great. That provides stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means Bluesky’s team has time to address 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 is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite financial backing from multiple crypto investors. That had worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.

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

Instead, the company may experiment with other monetization methods. The team hasn’t yet decided if Attie will eventually require a fee, as it’s still in private beta. 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 publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere as being similar to WordPress in this regard.

“At the center of the Atmosphere is a completely open system, so anyone can participate,” he says. “You can have all these independent, decentralized pieces that work together. With WordPress, that turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars — over $10 billion a year now — flowing through it.”

Schneider continues, “So it’s gotten very big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we hope for — that the Atmosphere will have a similar ability for many apps and services to coexist, work together, and build an ecosystem.”