Bluesky launched a new AI product at the ATmosphere conference on Saturday, and users responded with a blocking spree that tells a story of its own.

What Attie Does

Attie is a standalone AI app built on Bluesky's AT Protocol. Developed by a team led by former Bluesky CEO Jay Graber — who stepped down earlier in March to return to building — it uses Anthropic's Claude to let users describe the kind of content they want to see in plain language. Attie then assembles a custom feed from across the Bluesky ecosystem without requiring any code.

The idea is to democratize feed curation: instead of hand-picking follow lists or hoping the algorithm cooperates, you type "posts about urban planning and transit" and Attie builds a feed for it. Custom feeds can later be imported into Bluesky or any other ATProto app.

The Backlash

Within 27 hours of launch, Attie's account had been blocked over 125,000 times, putting it second only to Vice President JD Vance among Bluesky's most-blocked profiles — ahead of the White House and ICE. Analytics site ClearSky tracked the surge in real time.

User frustration centered on a specific irony: Bluesky built its audience partly as a refuge from X's algorithm and AI integrations. "You guys do realize that most of your user base came here because they wanted to get away from Twitter's AI?" wrote one illustrator in a widely reshared post.

Other critics questioned the timing, arguing unresolved platform issues — moderation tools, search reliability — should have come first.

Platform Response

Bluesky's interim CEO Toni Schneider framed Attie as a people-first tool: "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." He emphasized that Attie is a separate product, not part of the core Bluesky app, and that users remain in control of their own feeds.

The 125,000-block count may be less a verdict on Attie's quality than a signal of how much user trust Bluesky has to spend carefully as it scales.