Bluesky Launches Attie, an AI App for Building Custom Feeds

The social media feed has always been someone else's algorithm. On X, it's a black-box recommendation engine tuned to maximize time-on-app. On Meta's platforms, it's an advertising system dressed as a social graph. At this past weekend's Atmosphere conference in Vancouver, Bluesky unveiled a different proposition: a standalone AI app called Attie that hands the controls directly to users, letting anyone build a personalized custom feed through natural-language conversation, no code required.

Attie is the first standalone product built by Jay Graber's new team at Bluesky. Graber stepped down as CEO and now serves as chief innovation officer; she presented the app in Vancouver alongside CTO Paul Frazee. Conference attendees became the app's first beta testers on the spot.

Under the hood, Attie runs on Anthropic's Claude, making it an agentic application built on atproto, the open protocol that underpins Bluesky and an expanding ecosystem of compatible apps. The sign-in credential is an Atmosphere login, the same one that works across any atproto-based application. Because the network shares data openly across apps, Attie can read a user's interests, posting history, and social graph from the moment they log in. Users type requests in natural language, asking the AI what posts they might like to see or repost, and the app builds and refines a feed accordingly.

"You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds," interim CEO Toni Schneider said. "It's the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere." Schneider, who is also a partner at True Ventures, a Bluesky backer, was clear that Attie is not an extension of the main Bluesky app. "This is a standalone product, and it's the first one that's built by Jay's new team," he said. The company has not yet decided whether Attie will charge users; for now it remains a private beta.

Arriving alongside Attie is a separate expansion from Flipboard, which brought its Topics AI to Bluesky in the form of four branded custom feeds: Tech by Flipboard, Business by Flipboard, Celeb by Flipboard, and Lifestyle by Flipboard. Where Attie puts feed-building in individual hands, Flipboard's offering is a publisher-curated layer sitting atop the same open network.

Flipboard describes its process as starting with "the firehose of content being posted to Bluesky," then applying its topic-extraction algorithms to select and rank relevant posts. The approach runs deeper than keyword matching. For the Tech feed, the company's AI "digs into shared articles, analyzes the content inside them, and confirms that the article meets Flipboard's quality standards," ensuring the feed is "both on-topic and good quality." Its machine learning also assigns layered topic tags, so a single article might appear simultaneously in Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI feeds. "We've been using AI technology long before it was trendy," Flipboard noted.

The contrast with X and Meta is not incidental. Because atproto is open and auditable, researchers can in principle examine what data feeds are drawing on, something neither Meta nor X permits. But openness at the protocol level does not automatically mean transparency at the model level. Attie's use of Claude raises its own questions: what user data Anthropic processes, how requests are logged, and whether feed recommendations can encode the biases of an underlying model trained on data users never explicitly consented to share. Flipboard's stated "quality standards," meanwhile, remain undefined in any public documentation, leaving unclear who adjudicates borderline content and whether human review plays any role.

The fee question Schneider declined to answer could determine whether Attie's promise of democratized feed-building reaches beyond the conference attendees who got early access, or becomes another premium feature in a social media ecosystem that already sorts its users by what they can afford to pay.