The Bluesky team has created another app — and this time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that lets you design your own algorithm, create custom flows, 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 Frazeefirst introduced its AI application, called Attie. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude to build a social networking app based 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 True Ventures, which backs Bluesky.) “We’ve released a lot of stuff on Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom flows and all that sort of thing. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one built by Jay’s new team.”
With Attie, anyone will be able to create their own custom feed just by typing natural language commands, just like they’re conversing with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, users will sign in with their Atmosphere login (ie their login for any app running on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will instantly understand what you’re talking about, what kinds of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data between apps.
You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you might want to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, personalized for you.
“You control it, you configure it, without having to write code or know how to set up these flows,” says Schneider. “It’s the beginning of having a lot more people able to build on top of the Atmosphere.”
Furthermore, he adds, “It’s an AI product, but it’s a very human-centric AI product… We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure we’re using it to create things that really benefit people.”
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At startup, Attie can be used to create and view these streams, which will later be available to you in Bluesky or any other atproto application. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie users to code their own social apps as well as 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 the building rather than run the company.
“I think she realized there was a lot more 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 more time passed, [and] freed, I think it became clear that this is her happy part. He’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want him to build more things and not worry about running the company,” he says.
Graber says today that AI is being used by big platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase the time users spend in their apps, collect data and control their algorithms.
“We believe AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her announcement about Attie. “An open protocol puts that power directly into the hands of users. You can use it to create your own data streams, build software that works the way you want, and find signal in the noise.”
Graber’s decision to refocus on the protocol and product followed the company’s announcement that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round it closed last year. The team hopes the news serves as a message 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 rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means the Bluesky team has time to tackle the biggest challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and figuring out how to monetize the social network 43.4 million users.
One thing Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite financial backing from many crypto investors. This was something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared that the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.
“They’re the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization and were investing in things built on the blockchain that were highly decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the cryptocurrency space. “This is decentralized social, so it suits those who are invested in believing in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.”
Instead, the company can experiment with other means of monetization. The team has not yet decided if Attie will eventually require a fee, as it is only 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 the WordPress.com publishing platform, sees the atmosphere as similar to WordPress in this way.
“At the center of it [the Atmosphere] it’s a completely open system, so anyone can participate,” he says. “You can have all these independent, decentralized pieces working 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 really big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And that’s what we’re hoping, is that Atmosphere has a similar ability for a lot of these apps and services to co-exist and work together and build an ecosystem.”
