The Future of AI Should Serve People, Not Platforms
AI has begun to reshape every part of our digital experience. I keep coming back to Kranzberg’s first law of technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Its impact depends on how it’s used, by whom, and for what.
Bluesky’s mission is to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. I wrote that into our founding charter because I believe the internet should be built to serve the people who use it.
Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it. 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.
The 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. We think AI should serve people, not platforms. 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.
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.
So we asked: what happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you?
In my new role as CIO, I’ve started an Exploration team to find out. The first thing we’ve built is an app called Attie, named after the AT Protocol. Attie is an agentic social app and custom feed builder. It 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. Attie lives as a separate app, and using it is entirely your choice. Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social.
AI is an accelerant on whatever it’s applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users’ hands. But I don’t think the most interesting things built on atproto will come from us. They're going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building. We've just started experimenting, but we’re sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us.
Attie is open for beta signups today, and we'll be sharing what we learn along the way. To learn more about Attie, visit:
Come help us find out what this can be.
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