Bluesky's Attie Blocked 125,000 Times in Days
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- Bluesky launched AI assistant Attie at the ATmosphere conference, letting users design custom social media algorithms and feeds within its AT Protocol ecosystem
- Attie was blocked by approximately 125,000 users, making it the second most blocked account on Bluesky — with only about 1,500 followers, meaning roughly 83 times more users blocked the account than followed it
- Attie surpassed both the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks); only Vice President J.D. Vance has more blocks, at approximately 180,000
- Jay Graber, Bluesky's former CEO who recently moved to a CIO role, defended Attie in a blog post and to TechCrunch, arguing "AI should serve people, not platforms" and that Attie is built against the AI that major platforms use to "control what you see" and harvest advertising data
- Bluesky users also criticized the company's product priorities, noting the platform still lacks basic features like sending images via DM
- Bluesky grew to roughly 43 million accounts largely as an alternative to Elon Musk's X, which many users left in part to escape AI-driven feeds and content
Why it matters: Bluesky's 43-million-account userbase, which migrated from X in part to escape AI omnipresence, delivered a roughly 83-to-1 block-to-follow ratio against an AI product within days of launch — evidence that for this community, even a user-controlled AI tool registers as surrender to the trend they came to avoid. The speed and scale of the block response suggests organized user pushback now outpaces Bluesky's product roadmap.
