Bluesky’s team built another app. This time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that can design its own algorithms, create custom feeds, and one day even vibecode its own apps.
At last weekend’s Atmosphere conference, former Bluesky CEO and current Chief Innovation Officer Jay Graber and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee first announced an AI app called Attie. Conference attendees will be the first beta testers of the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude internally to create agent social apps built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (atproto for short).
“This is a new product and is not part of the Bluesky app,” Interim CEO Toni Schneider explained in an interview. (In addition to his role as CEO, Schneider is also a partner at Bluesky’s backing organization, True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things within Bluesky, like starter packs and custom feeds and all sorts of other things. This is a standalone product and the first product built by Jay’s new team.”
Attie allows anyone to create their own custom feed just by typing commands in natural language, just like chatting with other AI chatbots. To use the app, users sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning the login for apps running on atproto, including Bluesky). Bluesky and the broader ecosystem are open systems that share data between apps, so Attie instantly knows what you’re talking about, what you like, and more.
You can ask Attie questions, like which posts you’d like to see or repost, and use the app to curate your own custom feed tailored to you.
“You can control and shape it without having to write code or know how to configure feeds,” Schneider says. “This is the beginning of allowing more people to build on top of Atmosphere.”
He added, “It’s an AI product, but it’s a very human-focused AI product. We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to use it to build things that really benefit people.”
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At startup, you can create and view these feeds using Attie. These feeds will later be available within Bluesky or other atproto apps. Over time, the plan is to enable Attie users to vibecode their own social apps and build tools for others.
Schneider said Graeber and her team started working on the app several months ago, around the same time she decided to return to development instead of running the company.
“I think she realized there was a lot more she wanted to build. She felt like being a CEO was getting too busy and she needed more time,” Schneider told TechCrunch. “I think as she has more time and (and) more freedom, it’s become clear that this is her happy place. She’s a great leader and visionary. We want her to build more and not worry about running the company,” he says.
Graeber said AI is currently being used by major platforms to increase the amount of time people spend in apps, collect data, and control algorithms to serve them rather than users.
“We believe that AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graeber said in the Atty announcement. “Open protocols put this power directly in the hands of users, who can use it to build their own feeds, write software that behaves the way they want, and find the signal in the noise.”
Following Graber’s decision to refocus on its protocol and product, the company announced that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes this news sends a signal to the broader community that Bluesky is here to stay.
“This means we have more than three years of runway, which is great. It means stability and safety for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider told TechCrunch. It also means Bluesky’s team has time to tackle big challenges ahead, like adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding ways to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users.
However, Schneider assures us that despite financial support from multiple crypto investors, crypto consolidation is still far from over. This worried some Bluesky users who feared the app would be filled with cryptocurrency scams or become a payment tool.
Regarding Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space, Schneider said, “Investors who were attracted to decentralization were attracted to cryptocurrencies and were investing in things built on ultra-decentralized blockchains.” “This is decentralized social, so it suits people who believe in and invest in the opportunities of the platform and ecosystem.”
Instead, the company may experiment with other means of monetization. Since it’s just a private beta at the moment, the team has yet to decide whether Attie will ultimately require a fee. Other ideas floating around include subscription and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on top of the protocol.
Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, home of the 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. “You can have all of these independent, decentralized parts working together. With WordPress, you turn that into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars flowing through it, now more than $10 billion a year.”
Schneider continued, “It’s become very large, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we want: Atmosphere to have similar capabilities for many of these apps and services to coexist and work together to create an ecosystem.”
