Bluesky's Attie AI assistant becomes second-most blocked account amid user backlash

Bluesky's new AI tool Attie is already the most blocked account other than J.D. Vance | TechCrunch

Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company's AT Protocol ecosystem. And let's just say the response has been heated. Bluesky's userbase, which skews hostile toward AI, did not embrace the new product, which debuted this weekend at the company's Atmosphere conference. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie's Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it. The only account with more blocks than Bluesky's AI agent is Vice President J.D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks -- Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That's some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically. Bluesky did not respond to request for comment before publication. Bluesky grew much of its userbase -- now sitting at 43 million accounts -- as an alternative to Elon Musk's overhaul of Twitter into X, a platform now plagued by Neo-Nazism and AI-generated CSAM. For many Bluesky users, the platform serves as a reprieve from the more mainstream social internet, where AI search, AI chatbots, and even AI-generated video feeds are omnipresent, which makes the launch of Attie feel like a betrayal. Others have criticized Bluesky's product priorities, noting the platform is still missing highly requested basic features, like sending images via DM. From Bluesky's perspective, this product launch isn't as offensive as it seems. Jay Graber, the former Bluesky CEO who recently transitioned to a CIO role, wrote in a blog post the company thinks "AI should serve people, not platforms." "Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it," Graber wrote. "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy at a time when we need accurate information more than ever. The signal is getting harder to find exactly when it matters most." Graber is making the point that, while there are definitely evil uses of AI, the technology itself has a wide range of potential applications, and some of them may prove helpful for humanity. Social media is famously a poor venue for nuanced discussions about emotionally fraught topics. Then again, AI naysayers have legitimate reasons to boycott the technology -- the demand for more AI data centers and more computing power is already having tangible impacts on the environment while also eroding culture. Compared to the most offensive uses of AI, the potential danger of Attie is laughable. But for Bluesky users, this anger isn't so much about Attie itself as it is about what it symbolizes: a surrender to the idea that AI's encroachment into everything is inevitable.

Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds | TechCrunch

The team from Bluesky has built another app -- and this time, it's not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and, one day, vibe-code your own app. At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky's former CEO, Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, presented the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic's Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky's underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short). "It's a new product -- it's not a 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 inside Bluesky -- Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it's the first one that's built by Jay's new team." With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they're chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning their login for any app that runs on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you've been talking about, what sort of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps. You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, personalized to you. "You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds," Schneider says. "It's the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere." Plus, he adds, "It is an AI product, but it's an AI product that's very people-focused ... We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure that we use it to build things that really benefit people." At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie's users to vibe-code their own social apps as well as build tools for other people. Schneider says that Graber and her team began working on the app a few months ago, which was around the same time she decided to return to building, instead of running the company. "I think she realized that there was so much more that 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 she spent more time, [and] got freed up, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She's an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her building more things and not worrying about operating the company," he says. Graber says today, AI is being used by the major platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase people's time spent in their apps, harvesting data, and controlling their algorithms. "We think 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 it to, and find signal in the noise." Graber's decision to once again focus on 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 that news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to be around. "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 that Bluesky's team has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users. One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration -- despite the financial backing from multiple crypto investors. That's something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool. "It's the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on the blockchain that were super decentralized," Schneider says of Bluesky's backers in the crypto space. "This is decentralized social, so it fits those who are invested to believe in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity." Instead, the company may experiment with other means of monetization. The team hasn't yet decided if Attie will ultimately require a fee, as it's only a private beta for the time being. Other ideas being batted around include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol. Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, the home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere as being similar to WordPress in this way. "At the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anybody can participate," he says. "You can have all of 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're hoping for, for the Atmosphere to have that similar ability for lots of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem."

Bluesky Is Making an AI Feature. Here's Why Everyone Seems to Hate It Already

In its relatively short history as a social media platform, Bluesky has a pretty decent record for listening to its users. The site saw a surge in popularity after the 2024 election, following what many saw as Twitter's collapse after it was purchased, renamed, and dramatically changed by Elon Musk. But its newest AI project isn't winning over many users. Attie is a new AI assistant being built by Bluesky that can create custom social media feeds. It's named after the infrastructure behind Bluesky and Attie, the AT Protocol. Attie will be a separate, optional app. It's currently in an invite-only closed beta. Bluesky's CEO-turned-chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, is leading the company's Exploration team building Attie. In a personal blog post published on March 28, she describes Attie as a kind of vibe-coding tool. She wrote, "[Attie] 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." It seems like Attie is aiming to build a more comprehensive timeline than you could get simply by searching for topics. You can do more detailed searches with Attie, like "Poetry, long-form fiction craft, and writing process from people I follow," as one example on the Attie website reads. It shouldn't be creating new posts. But many Bluesky users aren't happy with the introduction of AI on the platform. In an era when social media platforms are diving all in on AI, Bluesky's Attie signals that nobody is immune to the internet's AI makeover. Almost immediately after Attie was announced, posts started flowing in. Users raised concerns about their posts being shared in the AI-compiled feeds. Some Bluesky users are angry about the company's investment in advanced, agentic AI, even though Bluesky still lacks comparatively basic functions, such as the ability to edit posts, DM images and follow hashtags. Many users bemoaned Attie as Bluesky's version of AI slop, one that nobody seemingly asked for. While Attie is a separate app, the AI agent does have a Bluesky-run account on the social media platform. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that Attie is one of the most-blocked Bluesky accounts, second only to Vice President JD Vance. Attie has reportedly been blocked by 125,000 Bluesky users, and Vance by 180,000. Graber told CNET in an email that the company wants to assure users that it's listening to their feedback and that Attie doesn't represent a change to Bluesky, as it's a separate app. "Attie is specifically designed against the kind of AI people are rightly frustrated with," Graber said. "The kind that the major platforms use AI to control what you see, maximize time-on-app, and harvest data for advertisers. Attie works for the user." Graber added in a post that Bluesky will "look into ways to take into account the preferences expressed by people who've blocked Attie." It's rare to find a social media platform in 2026 that isn't experimenting with AI. Meta and Google have loaded up Facebook, Instagram and YouTube with their AI. Social media users are sharing content increasingly created and edited with AI tools. This low-quality AI-generated content, often called "slop," is nearly inescapable online. Many experts and advocates have raised concerns that AI slop will contribute to misinformation and exploitation. We'll have to wait and see whether and how Attie changes during beta to fully understand what AI may be in Bluesky's future. For now, you can reduce the AI content you see in your Pinterest feed and Google apps.

Bluesky's new app is an AI for customizing your feed

The latest app from the team behind Bluesky is Attie, an AI assistant that lets you build your own algorithm. At the Atmosphere conference, Bluesky's former CEO, Jay Graber, and CTO Paul Frazee, unveiled Attie, which is powered by Anthropic's Claude and built on top of Bluesky's underlying AT Protocol (atproto). Attie allows users to create custom feeds using natural language. For example, you could ask for "posts about folklore, mythology, and traditional music, especially Celtic traditions." To start these custom feeds will be confined to a standalone Attie app. But the plan is to make them available in Bluesky and other atproto apps. But that's just the start. Users will eventually be able to use Attie to vibe code their own apps on top atproto. In a blog post, Graber said: We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently "anyone" really meant "anyone who can code." Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone. It's increasingly possible to personalize software with no coding experience at all. The Atmosphere is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on. For now Attie is in a closed beta. But you can join the waiting list by heading to attie.ai.

Bluesky's Attie AI Will Let You Request Custom Feeds

Bluesky has announced a new AI assistant that helps you personalize your social feed by providing natural-language prompts. The AI assistant, Attie, was built on Bluesky's open-source AT Protocol by the company's chief innovation officer (and former CEO), Jay Graber, and her new Exploration team. In a blog post, Graber describes Attie as "an agentic social app and custom feed builder" that will be offered as an optional standalone app. Attie is currently in beta, and those interested can register to join a waitlist. When you are cleared off the list, you'll be able to sign in to the platform using your Atmosphere credentials, TechCrunch notes. Those credentials work for any social app built using the AT Protocol, including Bluesky. In the app, you'll be able to describe the feed you'd like to read. Sample prompts seen on Attie's website include "Posts about folklore, mythology, and traditional music, especially Celtic traditions," "Poetry, long-form fiction craft, and writing process from people I follow," and "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design." Graber pitches the experience as something that "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." The purpose of Attie is to help people use AI to surface the social content they'd like to see. Most social networks currently use AI to boost engagement, harvest training data, and "shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose," Graber says. "We think AI should serve people, not platforms." At launch, Attie will let users build and view custom feeds. Later on, it will be integrated into Bluesky and other AT Protocol apps and eventually help people vibe-code their own social media apps, TechCrunch reports.

Bluesky's new Attie app uses AI to give you full control over your social feed

The standalone app, built on the AT Protocol and powered by Anthropic's Claude, was unveiled at the ATmosphere conference by Jay Graber, who stepped back from Bluesky's CEO role specifically to build it. It's currently invite-only, with a waitlist open. Bluesky's best-known differentiator from X and Threads has always been its custom feed system, the ability to subscribe to algorithmically curated streams built by anyone, not just the platform. The problem has been that building those feeds required knowing how to write code. Attie, a new standalone app unveiled at Bluesky's ATmosphere developer conference over the weekend, is designed to close that gap entirely. Attie lets users build personalised social feeds by describing what they want in plain language, the same way they would talk to any other AI assistant. Examples on the app's website include prompts like "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network" or "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design." The app translates those descriptions into working feeds, which can then be used within Bluesky or any other application built on the AT Protocol. It runs on Anthropic's Claude under the hood. At launch, Attie is invite-only and available initially to ATmosphere conference attendees; a public waitlist is open. The app was built by Jay Graber and a newly formed team called the Exploration team. Graber, who co-founded and was Bluesky's CEO, stepped back from the operational role a few months ago to return to building. Toni Schneider, a partner at True Ventures, one of Bluesky's backers, has taken over as interim CEO. Graber presented Attie at ATmosphere alongside Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee. Attie is a standalone product, not a feature of the Bluesky app, and it is built on the AT Protocol, the open-source decentralised framework that underpins Bluesky and a growing ecosystem of other applications, collectively referred to as the Atmosphere. Users sign in with their Atmosphere login, which means their existing Bluesky account works. Because the AT Protocol is an open data system, Attie can immediately understand a user's interests and social context across the whole ecosystem, not just Bluesky itself. The longer-term roadmap for Attie goes further: the plan is to allow users to vibe-code their own social applications from scratch, not just customise feeds. Schneider described it as "the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere." Bluesky's Jay Graber was explicit about the philosophy behind the product. In a blog post accompanying the launch, she wrote that major platforms "aren't trying to fix" the problem of AI-driven signal degradation on social media: "They're using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose." Attie is framed as the inverse: AI that gives users control over their own algorithmic environment rather than removing it. The company, which recently raised $100 million and counts more than 43 million users, has positioned Attie as its dedicated sandbox for agentic social experimentation, separate from the main Bluesky app that those users rely on.

Bluesky Has a New App, and It’s All About AI

Earlier this month, Jay Graber, at the time the CEO of Bluesky, stepped down and took a role as chief innovation officer of the social media platform. As fake as it may sound, chief innovation officer is a real job title, especially in the tech world, and as such, Graber’s team has already announced a realâ€"though not yet publicly releasedâ€"new app. According to TechCrunch, the app is called Attie, and it’s a piece of AI software designed to let users customize their social media experiences with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. New Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider told TechCrunch, “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky â€" Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.†He also told TechCrunch, “It is an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused.†This might chafe some Bluesky users, since Bluesky is famously a place where posts expressing anything positive about AI tend to be unpopular. The app’s success, if you can call it that, comes from users mostly just wanting a Twitter clone without Elon Musk attached to it during the Great Twitter Evacuation of 2023. But Bluesky was originally conceived of as a radically customizable and flexible platform, as suits the vibe of its crypto-loving founder, Jack Dorsey, who was also an original co-founder of Twitter. Graber, whose career in tech started at the blockchain logistics company SkuChain, has never wavered on customizability being Bluesky’s North Star. TechCrunch’s reporting on this new app comes from Bluesky’s 2026 Atmosphere conference, the conference for developers and enthusiasts working with Bluesky’s open protocol known as atpro. Thus the name “Attie.†With Attie, users apparently enter what are essentially chatbot prompts. The app will process whatever the user types, find posts they might be into across Bluesky and other atpro-friendly networks, and use that to customize their feed and overall experience. Attendees at Atmosphere were reportedly turned into guinea pigs and started beta testing Attie, which apparently is not yet complete. Ultimately, according to TechCrunch, the idea is that you can “vibe-code your own app.â€

Bluesky's new AI app can vibe-code your social feed

Don't want an algorithm determining what you see on social? Instead, just tell Attie what you want on your feed. We've been seeing a lot about how AI tools like Claude Code and Codex can vibe-code apps and web pages, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. What else can you vibe code? Here's an interesting possibility: your social feed. The folks behind Bluesky just unveiled Attie, which it's billing as the first "agentic" app for atproto, the decentralized social network that's the backbone of Bluesky and other open social services. Just like such vibe-coding apps as Claude Code, Codex, and Loveable, Attie (which is currently in closed beta) presents you not with a thicket of drop-down menus or keyword filters (like those "what are you interested in?" buttons), but a simple chat box. Using natural-language prompts, you type what you want to see in your social feed, anything from "give me art posts from people I follow plus similar creators" to "show me tech news but skip the crypto drama," and Attie will build a social feed for you. As described by interim Bluesky CEO Toni Schnieder at the ATmosphere Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia this past weekend, Attie is more than just a social search engine. Powered by Anthropic's Claude, Attie will let you take charge of your social graph in ways that aren't possible on closed networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X. "You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up those feeds," Schneider told TechCrunch. "It's an AI product, but it's an AI product that's very people-focused." It all sounds interesting on paper, but the whole concept of Attie is getting pushback from users who say they joined Bluesky to avoid AI manipulation of their feeds. "We don't want, we don't need AI systems or suggestions," wrote one user on Bluesky. "It's a waste of resources and will sour your user base on the platform." "I already got the social experience I wanted, simply by following the accounts I find interesting and blocking those I'm not interested in hearing from," wrote another user on Reddit. "Don't really need an LLM for that." Initially, Attie will be a standalone app for creating and viewing customized social feeds, but the plan is for Attie's feed-building abilities to roll out to Bluesky and other atproto-compatible social services. Even better, Attie could pave the way for everyday users to vibe-code their own social networks on top of Bluesky's open AT Protocol, Bluesky execs said at the ATmosphere conference.

New Bluesky AI only slightly less unpopular than JD Vance

Mere days after Bluesky announced its new AI product, Attie, the coding helper has already become the second most blocked account on the platform. The Attie profile was given the cold shoulder by 125,000 users already, TechCrunch reported. With just 1,500 followers, that means 83 times more users blocked Attie than followed it -- that number is higher than the official White House account, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) profile, and is second only to Vice President JD Vance, according to open source data. Attie was announced at the Bluesky-sponsored ATmosphere AT protocol conference by former CEO and now chief innovation officer Jay Graber. As Graber and co-host Paul Frazee, Bluesky CTO, explained, Attie is an agentic app that lets users "vibe code" their own social feeds. It's a tool that the platform believes will help cut down on low-quality, AI-generated slop and misinformation that is proliferating across the internet. Following widespread derision from Bluesky users, who denounced Bluesky's investment in generative AI products and flatly rejected Attie's integration on the open source platform, Graber posted a response: "We hear the concerns about AI. Our goal is to use this technology to give people greater control, not to generate content. Attie uses AI to help you create custom feeds without having to know how to code. We'll look into ways to take into account the preferences expressed by people who've blocked @attie.ai. The team has been making progress towards private accounts. There was a lot of good feedback on the tech at ATmosphereConf this week, and we'll have more to share soon." If you haven't already blocked Attie and instead have an open mind toward the app's vibe coding possibilities, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer. It's still in invite-only closed beta. Sign up for the waitlist on the Attie website.

Bluesky Users Respond With Overwhelming Disgust to Platform's New AI

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In its early days, Twitter alternative Bluesky tried to paint itself as a safe haven from the onslaught of AI, promising in November 2024 that it had "no intention" of scraping user-generated posts to train AI models. It was a shot across the bow, clearly aimed at its rival X-formerly-Twitter, which had recently changed its terms of service to allow just that. And since then, backlash to AI slop and relentless AI integrations has grown to new heights. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Bluesky's abrupt foray into AI isn't sitting well with its notoriously anti-AI user base. Specifically, the company's chief innovation officer Jay Graber, who stepped down as CEO earlier this month to focus on "exploring new ideas" at the company, announced a new AI app called Attie at a conference over the weekend. Attie, which interim CEO Toni Schneider referred to as a "new product" that's "not part of the Bluesky app" in an interview with TechCrunch, allows users to essentially vibe code their own custom feed using natural language prompts -- or even build their own Bluesky app alternative on top of the service's Atmosphere protocol, an ecosystem of interoperable social applications. "You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds," Schneider enthused. The CEO seemed well aware of the headwinds against launching consumer-facing AI products in 2026. "It is an AI product, but it's an AI product that's very people-focused," he told TechCrunch. "We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure that we use it to build things that really benefit people." "We think AI should serve people, not platforms," Graber told audiences at this weekend's announcement. "An open protocol puts this power directly in users' hands." However, given the immediate reactions to the new app, it may struggle to catch on. "Thanks, we're good, no need to explain it further," one user replied to Graber after she announced it in a Saturday post. "Cool!" another added. "How do we block it?" "Me, looking for who the f*** wants this," reads the caption of a meme a different user posted, showing a woman standing on a ladder and gazing into the distance. Graber appeared to be aware of the inflood of hatred for the idea. When a user told her that "we don't want it," she replied with a curt: "then don't use it -- it's a separate app." Graber also reshared a post by a different user who claimed people "on the left" were being "shortsighted" by being willfully blind about AI, and that the argument "'hope it goes away' doesn't have a great track record as a strategy for contesting control of new political domains and technologies." The implication: Bluesky users are wrong about their resentment over AI and should instead embrace it. Schneider told TechCrunch that the company is still considering how to monetize its latest feature, and that a fee for using Attie, which is currently in private beta, is on the table. But considering the outrage the app's announcement has wrought, it's unclear at best if any serious numbers of users are jumping to use it -- even if it's free, which could turn Attie into an expensive distraction and a largely ineffective way to draw new users in.

Bluesky built a new AI tool that wants to free you from social algorithms

The Attie app uses natural language to create personalized feeds. No more mystery algorithms. Bluesky just unveiled a new AI app called Attie, and it does something most social platforms refuse to let you do. It hands you the keys to your own algorithm. You build custom feeds by chatting with Attie like you would any other AI assistant. Tell it what kind of content you want to see, and it creates a personalized timeline on the spot. No coding, no complicated settings. The announcement came over the weekend at the Atmosphere conference, where attendees got first access to the private beta. Recommended Videos Attie runs on the AT Protocol, Bluesky's open social framework. That means it pulls from your activity across the whole ecosystem, not just one walled garden. The idea is simple, take algorithmic power away from platforms and put it in users' hands. Build your feed by just talking to it Sign in with your Atmosphere login, the same one you use for Bluesky or any other app built on the protocol. Attie already understands what you've been talking about and what you tend to like, because the system shares data openly across apps. From there, you can ask Attie what posts you might want to see or repost. Tell it to curate a feed around a specific topic, a certain vibe, or a mix of accounts you follow. The app builds that feed instantly. Interim CEO Toni Schneider calls it the start of a shift where more people can build on top of the Atmosphere without writing code. A deliberate push against big tech's AI playbook Major platforms are racing to stuff AI into their products, but often in ways that serve the company first. Jay Graber, who stepped down as Bluesky CEO to focus on building, put it bluntly. AI is being used to increase time spent in apps, harvest data, and control algorithms. Graber now serves as chief innovation officer, and Attie is her first project since the shift. She said AI should serve people, not platforms. An open system like the AT Protocol puts that power directly in users' hands. Schneider added that Attie is an AI product built to be people-focused. The team wants to use AI for things that actually benefit users, not just keep them scrolling. It's a deliberate contrast to how Meta and others are approaching the same technology. What comes next and what it might cost Attie is in private beta, starting with Atmosphere conference attendees. The company hasn't announced a wider release date yet, and it's still deciding whether the app will eventually carry a fee. For now, the focus is on getting Attie into more hands and expanding what it can do. The long-term plan includes letting users vibe-code their own full social apps, not just custom feeds. If that happens, Bluesky's open protocol could start looking less like a single social network and more like a foundation for something much larger.

Bluesky Users Revolt Against AI Tool Attie, Blocking It More Than ICE and White House Accounts - Decrypt

Users responding to the announcement raised concerns about automation, AI training, and the platform's direction. A new AI tool launched on Bluesky over the weekend has quickly become one of the most-blocked accounts on the platform, representing a strong anti-AI vibe on the rising social network rival to Elon Musk's X. The account for Attie, an experimental feed-building app, has been blocked 125,000 times since it was publicly announced on Saturday, according to data from analytics website ClearSky. That total places the account second only to U.S. Vice President JD Vance among the platform's most-blocked profiles. Attie has been blocked by users more than the accounts for the White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), both of which have been blocked by more than 100,000 users. Attie was created by The Atmosphere, a development team led by former CEO Jay Graber, and built using Bluesky's AT Protocol, the decentralized infrastructure that powers the network and lets developers build interoperable social apps. At its core, Attie lets users type in a simple description of the type of posts or topics they want in their personalized feed. Using AI, the tool automatically searches for relevant posts across Bluesky and assembles a custom feed that matches the user's request. While the launch was framed as a way to make the Bluesky experience better, it drew nearly immediate pushback from some users. "It would be kinda neat if Attie became the most-blocked account," wrote author Dani Finn. "Attie is almost as unpopular as ICE and JD Vance -- and it's only been about 27 hours," writer and artist Dan Lansdowne wrote late Sunday. Other users framed the feature as a shift away from what originally attracted them to the platform. "You guys do realize that most of your user base came here because they wanted to get away from Twitter's AI right?" illustrator Marco Alfaro commented. "So basically, you guys are turning the only advantage Bluesky had over X, and why most people migrated here. This definitely won't backfire." Others criticized the company's priorities as the platform grows. "This always happens when companies start to get bigger, they start to shift more into what they think the market wants rather than fixing issues that still exist on the main platform," tech YouTuber Sam Thibault wrote. Unlike Bluesky, X does not make its analytics publicly available, making it unclear how many times an account has been blocked by users. The surge in blocks reflects Bluesky's culture, where users often rely on blocking and shared blocklists to filter accounts they don't want to see. The practice has become a common form of user-driven moderation on the platform. When U.S. Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky last summer, his account quickly became the most-blocked on the site, still holding that record at 180,684 according to ClearSky.

Bluesky announces AI app, Attie, for custom feeds

Bluesky has created another app, Attie, that uses AI to build custom feeds. The Bluesky team announced Attie at the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, TechCrunch reported. The conference is about the AT protocol, which is the underlying protocol Bluesky is built on, according to TechCrunch, and the conference attendees will be the initial beta testers. Attie already has a Bluesky account, naturally, where it posted on Saturday that it's currently in an invite-only closed beta (much like how Bluesky was when it launched). "Attie is the first agentic social app on atproto [the AT protocol]," the post reads. "It's something completely new -- an experiment in making building on the protocol more accessible." The Attie presentation comes shortly after Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced she's stepping down from her position. Graber will now be chief innovation officer, and she was part of the Attie announcement along with CTO Paul Frazee, TechCrunch reported. Graber also posted a blog about Attie on Saturday, in which she wrote, "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy at a time when we need accurate information more than ever," yet major platforms aren't trying to fix the problem. Graber continued that she and the Bluesky team believe AI should "serve people, not platforms," and that an open protocol "puts this power directly in users' hands." It's increasingly possible to personalize software without being able to code, she wrote, thanks to agentic coding tools. "You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise," she wrote. Attie users will apparently be able to describe what posts they want to see, and the coding agent will build the feed they describe. The experience will be "more like having a conversation than configuring software," according to Graber. On the Attie website, examples of prompts include "poetry, long-form fiction craft, and writing process from people I follow" and "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network." Those without an invite code can sign up for Attie's waitlist on the website.

Bluesky unveils Attie, an AI app for building custom feeds

Bluesky has introduced Attie, an AI assistant app aimed at enabling users to create custom feeds and algorithms, a development presented at the Atmosphere conference by former CEO Jay Graber and CTO Paul Frazee. The app will be beta-tested by conference attendees and operates on Bluesky's AT Protocol, utilizing Anthropic's Claude AI. Interim CEO Toni Schneider emphasized that Attie is a standalone product, separate from the Bluesky social network, aimed at empowering users while minimizing the focus on platform profits. Attie allows users to interact with the app using natural language commands, enabling them to tailor their personalized feeds according to preferences. Schneider stated, "You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds." Users will sign in through their Atmosphere credentials to access the app's features. Graber highlighted that current applications of AI by major platforms often prioritize their advantage over user benefit. She noted, "We think AI should serve people, not platforms." Attie is designed to address this concern by providing tools to help users shape their experiences. Bluesky recently secured an additional $100 million in funding, providing a financial runway of over three years. Schneider remarked that this funding ensures stability and allows the team to focus on critical challenges like enhancing privacy controls and exploring monetization strategies, which remain undecided at this stage. Despite backing from crypto investors, Schneider confirmed that Bluesky has no plans for integrating cryptocurrency into Attie or the Bluesky platform. The team is exploring alternative monetization options, including subscriptions and hosting services for community management. Schneider envisions the Atmosphere's potential as akin to WordPress, promoting a decentralized ecosystem that fosters collaboration among various services and applications. He believes this vision could lead to significant financial flows similar to those generated by established platforms. Bluesky continues to develop its protocol and applications, with a user base of approximately 43.4 million, aiming for a sustainable and user-focused model in the evolving landscape of social media and AI.

Bluesky's Former CEO Jay Graber Unveils Her First Product in Innovation Chief Role

The former Bluesky CEO's first product as chief innovation officer puts feed control directly in users' hands. Jay Graber, the former Bluesky CEO who recently moved into the role of chief innovation officer, has been in her new position for just a month. Yet her tenure has already produced a major release: Attie, an agentic app designed to help users customize their social media feeds and algorithms. Attie reflects many of the priorities Graber emphasized during her time leading Bluesky. It emphasizes personalization and puts generative A.I. in the hands of users rather than corporations. Unveiled on March 28, the app is currently in beta testing. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Right now, most major social platforms are using A.I. to increase user time spent, harvest training data and develop opaque algorithms, said Graber, who noted that such companies should instead fix issues stemming from the technology, like floods of A.I.-generated content. "We think A.I. should serve people, not platforms." Built on top of Bluesky's decentralized protocol, Attie allows users to create their own custom social media feeds simply by typing in requests. Examples on Attie's website include: "show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network," or "posts about folklore, mythology and traditional music; especially Celtic traditions." Queries can be written in natural language rather than code, said Graber, noting that the rapid development of agentic tools has made it "increasingly possible to personalize software with no coding experience at all." Attie is the first product developed by Bluesky's Exploration Team, a specialized unit led by Graber in her new role. She previously served as CEO for more than four years, having been appointed in 2021 by Jack Dorsey -- then CEO of Twitter (now X) -- to lead the Twitter-incubated company before it spun off as an independent entity. Graber, who has also worked at blockchain company SkuChain, cryptocurrency project Zcash, and founded events app Happening, positioned her move from the CEO role as a return to her passion for "building new things." Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic and a partner at True Ventures, has stepped in as interim CEO while Bluesky's board searches for a permanent successor. "I think she realized there was so much more that she wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept her busy," Schneider told TechCrunch of Graber's internal pivot in a recent interview. Since refocusing on products, "it has become clear that this is her happy place," added Schneider, who described Attie as a people-focused A.I. product that will ensure the technology benefits all. Shortly after the executive shakeup, Bluesky revealed that it had raised $100 million in a Series B funding round in April of last year. That investment, Schneider said, gives the company at least three years of financial runway. It remains unclear whether Bluesky will eventually charge for Attie or keep it free. The platform is exploring various subscription and marketplace models but remains committed to staying ad-free. With 43 million users -- many of whom joined after Elon Musk's 2022 acquisition of Twitter -- Bluesky has positioned itself as a "billionaire-proof" alternative to mainstream social media. One thing is certain: Attie will stay a separate app from Bluesky, giving users the choice to opt in. As Bluesky evolves, Attie "will be where we experiment with agentic social," said Graber. "I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users' hands."

Meet Attie: Bluesky's AI assistant can customise your social feed - The Economic Times

Bluesky has introduced Attie, a new AI assistant that lets users easily create personalised feeds and algorithms just by chatting. Built on the decentralised atproto network, it gives users more control over what they see. The app is currently in beta and aims to simplify building social experiences.Social media platform Bluesky's team has introduced Attie, an AI-powered assistant that helps users build their own algorithms, customise feeds, and even "vibe-code" their own applications. A post from the Attie account on Bluesky described the project as follows: "Today, we're excited to introduce Attie, currently as an invite-only closed beta. Attie is the first agentic social app on atproto. It's something completely new -- an experiment in making building on the protocol more accessible." The Authenticated Transfer Protocol (atproto) is an open-source, decentralised network protocol designed for building social applications, and serves as the technical foundation for the Bluesky social network. Unlike traditional social media platforms, where a single company controls user data, algorithms, and content distribution, atproto allows different apps to connect to the same network. This means users can move between apps while keeping their identity and data intact. For instance, a user could leave Bluesky for another app built on atproto, log in with the same account, and still see their followers, posts, and personalised feed without starting from scratch. Attie builds on the vision behind Atmosphere, which was created as an open network where users can shape their own social media experiences. However, until now, doing so required a certain level of technical or engineering knowledge, the company said. Attie aims to remove that barrier. "Attie was designed by the Bluesky team to pull down that barrier, and make feed-building as easy as chatting. You describe what you want, and it makes a customised feed for you," the post continued. This development follows a recent leadership change at Jack Dorsey's Bluesky. Earlier this month, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO and moved into the role of chief innovation officer. According to a report by TechCrunch, she appeared at the Atmosphere conference over the weekend alongside Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, where Attie was officially introduced to the public for the first time. Conference attendees are set to become the first group of beta testers. The app is powered by Anthropic's Claude AI model and is built on Bluesky's underlying atproto. TechCrunch reports that Attie is not being integrated directly into the existing Bluesky app. Instead, it has been launched as a completely separate product. Interim CEO Toni Schneider explained, "It's a new product -- it's not a part of the Bluesky app. We've launched a lot of things inside Bluesky -- Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it's the first one that's built by Jay's new team." With Attie, users can create their own feeds simply by typing instructions in natural language, much like interacting with a chatbot. Once logged in using their atproto-based account (which includes Bluesky), the assistant can understand user preferences, past interactions, and interests. Because the system is open, Attie can access shared data across the network, enabling it to offer highly personalised suggestions. Users can ask questions such as what posts they might enjoy or want to repost, and the assistant will generate a tailored feed accordingly, TechCrunch reported. At launch, Attie's main function is to help users build and explore these custom feeds. Over time, the plan is to expand its capabilities further. Eventually, users may be able to create entirely new social apps or develop tools for others using vibe coding. The team believes this marks a shift in how people interact with social media platforms. "It's a totally different kind of social interface than anything that's come before. As with everything we build, it's centered around letting users discover and connect with what matters to them," the Bluesky post stated. Graber also highlighted a broader concern around how artificial intelligence is currently being used by major tech platforms. According to TechCrunch, she argued that AI is often deployed to benefit companies rather than users. "We think 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 it to, and find signal in the noise." For now, Attie remains in a private beta phase, and its long-term business model is still undecided. The report notes that possible options include subscription plans or hosting services for users who want to run their own communities on the protocol.