Good question! Thanks for asking.
The simplest and most direct answer, at least as I understand Attie right now, is no. It's not like ChatGPT or Perplexity. It doesn't read or search or index posts directly. It's more like Claude Code: it generates normal computer code, which then runs a normal Bluesky custom feed, just like any of the other custom feeds that have existed for years.
However. There's another answer, which is: yes. AI models, archiving services, "scrapers," companies, governments, and other people have always been able to read all public Bluesky posts and all public fediverse posts, including bridged posts. That's important to know if you post publicly, anywhere.
@snarfed.org @cairobraga @snarfed @bsky.brid.gy
How do you know this? Is Attie open source? Can you just look at the code to determine what it does?
@snarfed.org @mastodonmigration
@cairobraga
No disagreement here, except to say that scraping in the atproto world is 10x easier, because that’s fundamentally what the protocol is designed to do. Actually might be something like 30,000x easier (1 relay vs. 30k instances). But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening here too – I’m pretty confident that it is.
I will say that I am seriously considering ceasing to bridge my fediverse account to atproto because of this. It’s not that I’m particularly concerned about Attie, at least in it’s current form (and thanks for adding some clarity there Ryan). It’s not that it’s news to me that everything in atproto is definitely being scraped and stored, I’ve known that more or less since I started using it.
It’s the fundamental difference in approach to consent by the developer and user communities. Everyone using atproto is assumed to have consented to have all data made open and used for any and all purposes. I’m willing to engage on Bluesky, leaflet, tangled, etc. under those terms. I’m increasingly less excited about having my Fediverse accounts subject to those same assumptions and the same culture.
This is not to say I have no complaints about the developer or user communities in the Fediverse, or that there is any guarantee of privacy here.
But I’m starting to get a better understanding that one cornerstone of the “you can just do things” ethos of atproto includes “you can just do things with other people’s data.” I think I might lay low a bit and see how that shakes out.
@snarfed.org attie does seem to summarize the feeds as well, so I expect they’d have to send at least some of the posts in the feed to Claude in order to generate that summary (not to distract from your point about public posts on the internet)
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