Bluesky expanded its Attie AI assistant this week with Quests, a research feature that lets users query trending topics, influential accounts, and news spreading across the AT Protocol. The addition arrives as Bluesky's growth has flattened, with the network now reporting 45.6 million registered accounts after doubling to 40 million last October. Attie, launched in March, is Bluesky's bet that a natural-language interface can pull more users into the customization layer that has always defined the AT Protocol but rarely reached casual accounts.
Quests handles open-ended prompts across the network Bluesky calls the Atmosphere — not just Bluesky itself, but any app built on the underlying protocol. A user can ask Attie to surface trending discussions in a specific field, identify the most influential accounts in a given location, or track how a story is moving through the open social web. Bluesky is releasing Quests in beta, with waitlisted users invited over the coming weeks.
Attie began as a way to design custom feeds and algorithms without writing code, and Bluesky has floated eventually letting users vibe-code their own client apps through the assistant. The service is free for now, though the company has said it may charge for it. Quests moves Attie from a feed-builder toward a general-purpose research tool for the open social web, a category no incumbent has meaningfully claimed.
Key facts
- 01Bluesky added a Quests feature to its Attie AI assistant, letting users ask open-ended research questions across the AT Protocol.
- 02Bluesky's user base sits at 45.6 million registered accounts, after doubling to 40 million last October.
- 03Bluesky raised $100 million in a round that closed in 2025, giving it runway to experiment with Attie and other services.
- 04Jay Graber stepped down as CEO in March and was replaced by Toni Schneider, the founding CEO of Automattic.
- 05Attie launched in March as a separate product for building custom feeds and algorithms without programming.
Jay Graber, Bluesky's chief innovation officer, framed the pitch in a post accompanying the launch, describing Attie as a way to counter misinformation by handing users the tools to investigate directly rather than depending on curated feeds. Graber stepped down as CEO in March and was replaced by Toni Schneider, the founding CEO of Automattic, though she remains centrally involved in product direction.
Attie is also being redesigned with accessibility features and a new logo, and Graber said more changes are on the way. The redesign signals that Bluesky sees Attie as a durable second product rather than a side experiment — one that could carry a premium tier or power-user tooling if the company decides to monetize.
The strategic tension is that Bluesky's user community is broadly hostile to generative AI on economic, environmental, and political grounds, and the company has to run its AI product against that headwind. Bluesky raised $100 million in a round that closed in 2025, giving it enough runway to experiment with Attie, a possible premium subscription, and tools aimed at power users without needing to force revenue out of the core feed immediately.
“We want Attie to reduce the barrier to entry and expertise required to learn how to use the AT Protocol, and to put the tools for customizing your experience in the hands of anyone who wants them”— Jay Graber, Bluesky Chief Innovation Officer
Growth is the underlying pressure. The jump from roughly 20 million to 40 million users in the year ending last October made Bluesky look like the durable open alternative to a certain competitor. The eight months since have been quieter — 45.6 million is a modest step up — and the company needs product surface area beyond the timeline to justify its valuation and its independence.
Attie is also a bet on the AT Protocol itself. Bluesky has repeatedly said its long-term value is the open protocol, not the flagship app, but the protocol has struggled to attract mainstream developers or breakout third-party clients. If Attie can let non-programmers spin up custom feeds and eventually apps against the AT Protocol, it doubles as developer-tooling by another name — a way to grow the ecosystem without waiting for third-party developers to show up first.
The obvious risk is that a research assistant built on top of a still-modest social graph produces thin answers. Quests will only be as useful as the data flowing through the Atmosphere, and 45.6 million accounts is a fraction of the scale a general-purpose social search tool typically draws on. Bluesky is also asking users who joined the network partly to escape opaque AI-driven ranking to trust an AI to rank things for them.
The interesting move here is Bluesky treating its protocol as a queryable substrate rather than just a feed. If Quests works, Bluesky becomes one of the few social networks where a user can point an AI at the entire public graph and get structured answers back — something the closed networks structurally cannot offer without opening APIs they have spent years locking down. That is a defensible position, and it is the kind of product wedge that makes the $100 million round look like patience rather than delay.
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