The Bluesky team has built another app. This time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that lets you design your own algorithms, create custom feeds, and one day even Vive-code your own apps.
At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Jay Graber, Bluesky’s former CEO and current Chief Innovation Officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee debuted an AI app called Attie. Conference attendees will be early beta testers of a new experience that leverages Anthropic’s Claude internally to create agent social apps built on Bluesky’s native protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short).
“This is 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 a lot of things within Bluesky: starter packs, custom feeds, and all kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first product that Jay’s new team has built.”
With Attie, anyone can build their own personalized feed by simply entering commands in natural language, as if chatting with another AI chatbot. To use the app, people must log in with an Atmosphere login (which means a login for all apps running on atproto, including Bluesky). Because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps, Attie instantly understands what you say, what kinds of things you like, and more.
You can ask Attie questions, such as what posts you’d like to see or repost, and use the app to curate a personalized feed tailored just for you.
“You can control and shape these feeds without having to write code or know how to set them up,” says Schneider. “This is the beginning of more people being able to build on Atmosphere.”
Moreover, he added, “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 use AI to create products that actually benefit people.”
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At launch, you will be able to use Attie to build and view these feeds, which can later be used within Bluesky or other atproto apps. Over time, we plan to enable Attie users to vibe code their own social apps and create tools for others.
Schneider said Graber and her team began working on the app several months ago, when she decided to return to the building instead of running the company.
“She realized there was so much more she wanted to create, and she felt she was busy just doing the CEO job and needed more time,” Schneider told TechCrunch. “As she has more time and freedom, I think it’s become clear that this is her happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her to build more and not worry about running the company,” he says.
Graber says AI today is being used by major platforms to increase the time people spend on apps, collect data, and control algorithms to serve themselves rather than their users.
“We believe AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in his announcement about Attie. “Open protocols put this power right into the hands of users. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want, and find the signal in the noise.”
Graber’s decision to once again focus on its protocol and product led to the company’s announcement that it has now secured $100 million in additional funding in a round it closed last year. The team hopes this news is a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to exist.
“This means we have a runway of three years or more, which is great. It means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider told TechCrunch. It also means Bluesky’s team has time to tackle bigger challenges ahead, including adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding ways to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users.
However, one thing Schneider assures us is that despite the financial support of several cryptocurrency investors, cryptocurrency consolidation is not in the works. This worried some Bluesky users who feared the app would be full of cryptocurrency scams or become a payment tool.
“These are the type of investors who were attracted to cryptocurrencies because of the decentralization and were investing in something built on a hyper-decentralized blockchain,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the cryptocurrency space. “It’s a decentralized social, so it’s perfect for people who are invested and believe in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.”
Instead, the company might experiment with other means of generating revenue. Attie is in private beta for the time being, so whether it will ultimately require a fee has yet to be determined. Other controversial ideas include subscription and hosting services for people who want to host their own communities according to the protocol.
Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees Atmosphere’s potential as similar to WordPress in this respect.
“At the heart of (atmosphere) is a completely open system, so anyone can participate,” he says. “All of these independent, decentralized parts can work together. With WordPress, it’s turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars flowing (now more than $10 billion a year).”
Schneider continued, “Even though it’s completely decentralized, it’s become very large, and that’s what we’re hoping is that Atmosphere will have a similar ability for a lot of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”
