You’re reading an issue of “The AI Economy,” my newsletter exploring the forces shaping the AI era—tracking how AI is rewriting business, work, technology, and culture. Subscribe to get expert insights and curated updates delivered straight to your inbox.
Bluesky has introduced an agentic social app on the AT Protocol called Attie. It’s a standalone experiment that lets users create custom feeds by describing in plain language what they want to see. Announced at the ATmosphere conference, Attie is currently invite-only and appears to be Bluesky’s inaugural foray into AI.
Jay Graber, who recently stepped down as Bluesky’s chief executive to become CIO, writes in a post that “AI is undermining human agency at the same time it’s enhancing it,” citing the spread of AI slop that continues to undermine what people can trust on social media. “The signal is getting harder to find exactly when it matters most.”
She states that major platforms “aren’t trying to fix this problem. 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 taking an antithetical approach, leveraging AI to benefit users, not the technology. That means, “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.”
Although it’s from Bluesky, this is an independent app built by Graber’s new Exploration team. Users describe what they want to see, such as “show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network” or “builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design,” and Attie will craft a personalized feed that users can control. Because it’s built on the AT Protocol, it will understand what you like, what you’ve been talking about, and other details shared not only on Bluesky but also elsewhere in the ecosystem. It can also be ported over to other supported apps.
Since 2023, Bluesky has supported custom feeds—but building them has largely required technical know-how or manual curation. Users could choose between hand-picking sources themselves or subscribing to algorithm-powered feeds built by third-party developers. Attie’s introduction offers an alternative: anyone can describe what they want in plain language, and AI will handle the rest.
That said, Attie isn’t exactly alone in its class. While it may be the first to use an AI agent to craft feeds, there are some parallels between what it does and Flipboard’s Surf app. Both support the AT Protocol, reject platform-controlled feeds, empower users with feed controls, embrace the decentralized web, and are both in beta.
Still, there are marked differences between the two. Namely, Attie has a conversational user interface and doesn’t allow manual curation. On the other hand, Surf supports Mastodon, Threads, YouTube, and other platforms and is independent of any protocol team.
Disclosure: I previously worked at Flipboard and own a small amount of equity. Rest assured, the opinions expressed here are solely my own. I have — and remain — a big fan of the technology.Bluesky assures its users that it’s not done innovating on its namesake app. It doesn’t seem like we’ll see Attie’s technology brought over anytime soon. Graber states that Attie will be the place where the organization experiments with agentic social. And according to TechCrunch, Bluesky plans to allow Attie’s users to vibe code their own social apps and build their own tools.
Featured Image: Credit: Screenshot
