Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself.

Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate.

I’ve written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking back control over the open web. I know this is not a popular opinion with many Techdirt readers, but I’m hoping some of you will read through this to try to understand and engage with the points I’m making here. I truly do believe that if used well and appropriately, these tools can serve to put power back into the hands of users, rather than giant centralized companies who are more interested in exploiting your attention.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with an AI-powered tool that Bluesky has released (much to the chagrin of many users) to a relatively small group of early beta testers. I think the negative reaction to the product announcement is understandable, given the general distrust of all AI tools, but it’s really worth examining what this tool is and what it can enable, including really empowering people to take back control over their own social experience. It literally gives you a path to routing around Bluesky’s own design features if you don’t like them.

Yes, a lot of AI is overhyped garbage being shoved at people who don’t want it — but that doesn’t mean the underlying tools can’t be useful when applied carefully by those who choose to use the tools appropriately.

It means not outsourcing your brain to the tool, but rather using it the way any skilled person automates some aspect of work that they do. I’ve sanded and restained the floors of my house, and while I could have done the whole thing by hand with a stack of sandpaper, it was helpful to rent a floor sander from a local hardware store, learn how to use it properly, and then use it so that I could finish the job in a day rather than weeks. I view AI tools the same way. If you learn how to use them properly, as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for your brain, they can help you accomplish useful things.

Let me give an example: a couple of weeks ago, law professor Blake Reid wrote a short thread on Bluesky about how he needed to take a break from social media, because he worried that it was eating up too much of his time and he was better off just stopping cold turkey, to avoid getting sucked into unproductive discussions that push him to (as he put it) “get over my skis” in engaging in conversations where he’s tempted to weigh in despite not having much expertise (a common thing on social media). It’s a worthwhile thread.

But in that thread he mentioned that he was hopeful that maybe some day technology itself could help him use social media in a healthier way, to dial back how much time he spent on it, and get him focused on the more productive and useful discussions (which he admits also happen regularly on Bluesky).

What was amusing to me was that the only reason I saw that post by Reid was because I’ve been beta testing a new tool that… kinda does that. When he wrote that thread, I was actually on vacation, hiking in the National Parks in Utah, and mostly offline. But in the evenings, I would check in, and rather than sorting through everything I missed on social media that day, I had a tool just show me things that I would find useful that I might have missed.

But using an AI tool, I had built an entirely personalized news aggregator, which had access to my Bluesky account, Techdirt’s RSS feed, and the knowledge that I had been out all day and wanted not just a summary of what news might be interesting to me as the editor of Techdirt, but also what people on Bluesky were saying about it. Here’s a screenshot of what my first attempt at this looks like:

The tool that let me do this is an advanced version of Attie, which I also recognize is extremely controversial among users on Bluesky, many of whom vocally have expressed their hatred of the very idea of it when it was announced last month. But, my main interest is in figuring out to empower users who want to take control over their own social experience, and this seems like a clear example of that. I’ll note that this version of Attie has not yet rolled out to most of the beta testers (I believe some have access to it — but this is one small benefit of being on the board).

Honestly, I think the way Bluesky announced Attie may have done it an injustice, positioning it as a kind of AI-powered feed generator. There are multiple other feed generator tools for Bluesky out there, many of which are really fantastic. For a while now I’ve used both Graze.social and Surf.social to make AI-powered feeds (which never seemed to generate much controversy).

But generating feeds alone isn’t all that interesting. With the more advanced version of Attie, I can take much more control over my entire social experience. The fact that with a single prompt I could build that personalized aggregator (based not just on my own feed, but Techdirt’s RSS) is something more powerful, including the fact that the tool knows to summarize a whole days’ worth of posts, because I’m trying to see in a glance if there’s anything relevant for Techdirt and I’d been offline the entire day.

Rather than just letting a single company (in this case Bluesky) define my entire experience for me, I can vibe-code my social experience. I can tell it not just the types of content I want to see, but how I want to see it. And for what reason. And how much (or how little) content to show me. And with what context around it. It’s all based on what I expressly want. Not what any company thinks I want.

And I keep experimenting with other versions of this as well. In one test, I had it also try to summarize stories and tell me why it thought I’d find them useful for Techdirt:

In this case it not only found a story that is interesting to me, but it suggested multiple sources for me to read about it, even noting (for example) that Professor Eric Goldman’s blog post is “the definitive blog post” for my coverage (it’s not wrong).

I go back to the piece I wrote a little while back about the kind of learned helplessness of social media users. We’ve had two decades of billionaires deciding exactly how they wanted to intermediate your social experience. How your feed looks. What kind of algorithm you’ll see. What sorts of content will be put in your feed. They got to focus on engagement maxxing. You just had to deal with it.

In such a world, the only thing users felt they could do in response was to yell. They could yell at the CEOs of these platforms. Or at the government, telling them to yell at the CEOs of these platforms.

But with an AI tool that explores an open social ecosystem, you don’t need to yell at a CEO or a regulator. You can just tell the tool what you want, what you don’t want, how you want (or don’t want) to see it, and what context would be useful. It puts you in control.

And yes, sometimes it makes mistakes. It can recommend a story I’m not interested in. But, then I can just tell it that such and such story isn’t useful and why… and it will update the system for me.

Once again, I understand that some people hate any and all uses of AI. And I’m not suggesting you have to run out and use the tools yourself. You do you. But showing concrete use cases where these tools actually deliver more user agency — more control over your online environment, rather than deferring to the whims of any particular company — matters.

The larger point here isn’t really about Attie specifically (indeed, anyone could build their own version of this thanks to open protocols). It’s that for two decades, users have been trained to believe their only options are to accept whatever a platform gives them, or yell loudly enough that someone powerful might change it. That’s the learned helplessness I wrote about earlier, and it’s corrosive.

Tools like this — built on open protocols, not locked inside a corporate walled garden — represent a different path. One where you don’t petition a billionaire for a better feed algorithm. You don’t petition the government to try to put time limits on social media. You just build the experience you want. You tell it to make you a better interface that matches what you want. You tell it you don’t want to spend that much time. That’s what “protocols, not platforms” actually looks like in practice, helped along by agentic tools, and it’s why I think this matters well beyond whether any particular AI tool is good or not.