Bluesky is doubling down

I’m currently in Vancouver for ATmosphereConf 2026, surrounded by people who care deeply about things like data portability and unparalleled seismic activity on the Alaskan coast. If that sounds weird, don’t worry. All you really need to know is that this conference is nerdy, it’s niche, and most of the people here think they might just save the internet.

The guest of honor at ATmosphereConf is the AT protocol. If you know what that is, congrats. Happy for you. Nice. If you don’t, let me give you a little primer.

Social media platforms like X and Facebook are walled gardens. They’re little digital towns owned and operated by, largely, one billionaire at a time. Fun how that works. This closed model used to be great for scaling quickly, but once a couple of companies eventually got all the users, social media slowly started rotting. Everything eventually got more ads, more rage bait, and gave people less and less control. This process is known colloquially as 🌈enshittification🌈.

The social web, containing platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, etc., wants to blow those walls down. By using open protocols, they’re attempting to take power away from the platforms and put it back in the hands of the users actually making the content. They do this by using common languages, and can tap into each other’s data pools to fill their feeds with content. Although Mastodon and Bluesky technically use different protocols, the openness of them makes them compatible through third party developers like Surf.social or OpenVibe, who can gather all the data from all these platforms into one place.

Bluesky, the social startup that was incubated at Twitter, says the two main goals of the social web should be to give users freedom of movement across platforms, and, maybe more importantly, freedom to craft their own social media experiences through the use of feeds.

Bluesky’s flagship feature is "custom feeds," which is essentially the ability to build your own personal algorithm. Really into moss? There’s a feed for that. Obsessed with Colombian football? There’s one for that, too. You can make a feed from practically any topic you want, but right now, it's not exactly easy to create one. Making a custom feed requires actual programming knowledge, and this can act as a deterrent to people actually using Bluesky’s flagship feature. Just look at the official starter guide. It’s not exactly simple.

This presents a problem. Default experiences are incredibly powerful. There’s a reason Google paid Apple an estimated $20 billion a year to have Google search remain the default on Apple devices. It’s because what the majority of users will use is whatever is right in front of them. And without a simpler way to make your own defaults, Bluesky has developed a bit of a monoculture that has deterred a lot of users hoping to migrate from X or Threads. If people were more active on the custom feeds Bluesky was designed around, they’d be more likely to stick around, coming back to check in on what interests them, not on what the most people are talking about at the moment.

At a “State of the ATmosphere” panel at ATmosphere Conf today, Bluesky’s Jay Graber and CTO Paul Frazee introduced Attie, a new experiment meant to make feeds easier to customize and launch on Bluesky. Attie isn’t currently part of Bluesky, it’s a separate web app built to make Bluesky feeds with natural language.

Attie works like this: type in the type of feed you want to see on Bluesky, and the app will curate a custom feed for you that you can instantly launch on Bluesky. Like any other LLM, you can keep talking to the app to refine your feed, asking for certain things to appear and others to not. For example, I asked Attie for a feed about film photography, then asked that it only show me photos of mountains, and it complied.

Graber tells me to think of Attie like a sandbox for features Bluesky is testing out, not something they’re shoving down users’ throats. The natural language of it all has clearly given some users the ick, with multiple people replying to my live posts nervous that Bluesky is going to start selling AI services. But Graber is assuring users that Attie is just a playground to see what’s possible with open social platforms. Jay says she sees a future where software is ‘liquid’, being easily modifiable to suit a user's preferences and tastes. At least with social media, I think this is an interesting idea.

Most ‘for you’ feeds feel extractive. They harvest attention and generally leave you feeling worse than when you showed up. I don’t care how many times Adam Mosseri tells me Instagram is simply showing me ‘more of what I like’. There is a clear difference between what I like and what my dopamine-loving brain wants to click on. A curated algorithm that I built to surf in a way that feels healthy, and not at the whims of what a platform wants me to look at feels much better, assuming I can train myself to actually go there instead of the more addicting feeds.

On stage, Paul demoed a currently unreleased version of the platform the company is only using internally. Paul tells Attie that he doesn’t want to see users' handles, and would rather only see their names, and Attie complies.

I wanted to see where the limits of this software were, so I asked Attie to turn my feed purple. Unfortunately, it denied my request, stating that it can only modify the content and logic of your feed (sources, filters, labels, ranking), but not aspects of the site itself. I asked Graber and Frazee why I can’t go full MySpace with this thing, and both seemed apprehensive. Both repeated the importance of a cohesive experience that people understand how to use.

I get it. They’re building a multi-million-user network; I’m just a guy who wants to see the internet get weird again. But I can't help but hope they eventually set this thing loose. I’m tired of drab social networks that all look the same, with the extent of customization being a dark theme, profile photo, and a bio. I want the Wild West back. I want the gifs, the bad colors, the personal blogs. I'm just tired of drab monotone websites.

Regardless, Attie is a fascinating first step. With Graber moving into a full-time experimental role as Chief Innovation Officer, it’s clear Bluesky is done playing it safe. And if software is really becoming liquid, I’m ready to see what kind of mess we can make with it.