Bluesky has announced a new app that provides users with an AI-generated feed of posts based on their prompts and activity across the web.
The new app, Attie, was announced at the Atmosphere conference last weekend by the company’s chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, and chief technology officer, Paul Frazee.
‘What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you?’ Graber, who is the founder and former CEO of Bluesky, asked in a subsequent blog post. She went on to explain: ‘Attie is an agentic social app and custom feed builder. It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software. You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described.’
Available only to attendees of the conference for its beta-testing phase, Attie allows users to build a feed of Bluesky posts through natural dialogue with an AI chatbot. It will already have the users’ data from any other Atmosphere accounts they hold, on Bluesky or Whitewind, for example.
The Attie app is powered by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, and Bluesky’s own social framework, AT Protocol (atproto). Bluesky’s interim CEO Toni Schneider described it as ‘an AI product that’s very people-focused’.
In an interview with TechCrunch, he explained his hope that Atmosphere will become a ‘huge ecosystem’ of independent apps and services in the same manner as WordPress (owned by Automattic, of which he was previously CEO).
Graber added: ‘AI is an accelerant on whatever it’s applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralising social and putting power back in users’ hands. But I don’t think the most interesting things built on atproto will come from us. They’re going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.’
This approach appears to be putting Attie in deliberate opposition to AI products and algorithmic feeds by other social media sites. The launch comes just after the US court ruling that found Meta and YouTube liable for ‘addictive’ products, in particular blaming the algorithms used on those sites for young people experiencing mental health problems. Bluesky leadership has stressed how Attie will instead allow users to control their algorithm themselves.
Despite this, Attie is proving unpopular with existing Bluesky users. Within a day of the announcement, Attie’s Bluesky account had become the second-most blocked account on the site, beaten only by JD Vance (according to Bluesky stats tool Clearsky). As of 31 March, 142,695 users had blocked the account and 2,259 had followed it.
This may be due to the popularity of AI blocklists. Bluesky allows users to generate lists that other users can subscribe to, to automatically block all the accounts listed, and there are several popular AI blocklists — all of which filtered out Attie.
Graber appears to be unconcerned by the backlash, responding to one bluesky user who commented on her post about Attie with ‘we don’t want it’ with ‘then don’t use it — it’s a separate app’.
