The team from 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, vibe-code your app.
At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, former Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, unveiled the AI system, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will be the first beta testers of the new experience, which uses Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create a public application built on top of Bluesky’s core 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 who backs True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things within Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom meals, and all those kinds of things. This is a stand-alone product, and it’s the first one that Jay’s new team is building.”
With Attie, anyone will be able to create their own custom feed by simply typing commands in natural language, just like chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning their login to any app that runs on atproto, including Bluesky). Attie will quickly understand what you’re talking about, what kind of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across applications.
You can ask Attie questions, like which posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to customize your feed, personalized to you.
“You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up this feed,” Schneider said. “It’s just the beginning of having more people who will be able to build on top of the Atmosphere.”
And, he adds, “It’s an AI product, but a very human-centric AI product…
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When launched, Attie can be used to create and view these feeds, which will later be available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto application. In the long term, the plan is to allow Attie users to code their own public applications and build tools for other people.
Schneider says Graber and his team started working on the app a few months ago, around the same time he decided to go back to building, instead of running the company.
“I think he realized there was so much he wanted to build, and doing the CEO job kept him busy, and he felt like he wanted more time,” Schneider told TechCrunch. “As he spends a lot of time, [and] he was relieved, I think it was clear that this is his happy place. He is an amazing and visionary leader, and we want him to build more things and not worry about the company’s performance,” he said.
Graber says that today, AI is being used by big platforms to work for them, not their users, by trying to maximize the time people spend on their apps, harvesting data, and controlling their algorithms.
“We think AI should work for people, not platforms,” Graber said in his Attie announcement. “An open protocol puts this power directly in the hands of users. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want, and get signal to noise.”
Graber’s decision to refocus on the protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes the news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to exist.
“It means we have three-plus years of runway, which is great. That means stability and security for the entire ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means the Bluesky team has time to tackle the big challenges ahead, including adding privacy controls to the protocol and figuring out how to monetize the network’s 43.4 million users.
One thing that Schneider assures us is that it is not in the works, however, any crypto integration – despite financial support from many crypto investors. That’s something that’s worried some Bluesky users, who fear the app will be overrun with crypto scams or become a payment tool.
“It’s the type of investors that were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on the blockchain that were very decentralized,” Schneider said of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is social, so it behooves those invested to believe in the platform and the opportunity of the ecosystem.”
Instead, the company may try other ways to make money. The team hasn’t decided if Attie will eventually require payment, as it’s only in private beta at the moment. Other ideas being floated include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their communities on the protocol.
Schneider, former CEO of Automattic, home of the WordPress.com publishing platform, sees the potential of Atmosphere as WordPress in this way.
“In the middle of [the Atmosphere] it’s a completely open program, so anyone can participate.” “You can have all these independent, separated pieces in areas that work together. With WordPress, it has become a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars – more than $10 billion a year, now – flowing through it. “
Schneider continues, “So it’s very mature, even though it’s completely isolated. And that’s what we hope for, that the Universe has that same ability so that many of these applications and services can coexist and work together and create an ecosystem.”
