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As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates started his campaign protecting social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
initiative, Free Our FeedsIt aims to protect Bluesky’s core technology, the AT Protocol, and use it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to create a public interest fund that will finance the creation of new interoperable social networks that can work with the AT Protocol, and to build an independent infrastructure to support these new platforms even if Bluesky ends up in the field. hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after the Meta announced that it has stopped fact-checking and relaxes content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg effectively controls the company by owning super-voting shares, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. comes as well Bluesky has seen a recent increase in its users owner Elon Musk moved from X (formerly Twitter) after using the platform to target Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and others. Free our Feeds, launched with the support of several well-known names, including
Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the project’s nine “guardians,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations he and the other founding members had as they explored ways to change social media and digital infrastructure. it works.
“If you think about our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires and they could pay any taxes, decide who was allowed to go where, etc. “And the digital infrastructure, as you know, is obviously not great, and maybe it looks like a path in your face, but it works the same way. It has the same dynamics, the same concentration of power. And so essentially what we’re doing is the public good of this digital infrastructure is to make sure it is properly managed.”
While the team admits it shares the same values as Bluesky, it believes the company is vulnerable to pressure from venture capital, and if it falls under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternative options backed by independent infrastructure. The team reached out to Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network supports its mission to prove the AT protocol against billionaires.
Free Our Feeds wants to raise $30 million over three years and has an immediate goal of $4 million to hire a small team and build independent infrastructure.
“The purpose of the infrastructure development is to make sure that the AT protocol that underpins Bluesky can remain open,” Berjon said. “They’ve made it open source, people can use it. But since there’s only one big being, that’s Bluesky, there’s no compensating power, no one else to make sure it stays open. We intend to run an independent infrastructure from Bluesky that matches them, supporting the entire network, not just their main location. The idea is to really continue to raise money to be a credible actor in that space and use that money to fund other programs.”
Currently, the AT Protocol is mainly used to build BlueSky, but it can also be used to build other social applications, Berjon says.
“Using the same infrastructure, you can create an Instagram analog, a Facebook analog, a Tiktok analog, or, you know, things that haven’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that’s actually the goal. It’s not just copying things. And while inventing these new things, there’s no need to reinvent user accounts or storage systems, etc. People can simply use their existing accounts with your new item because it is compatible with the AT protocol. And so we really want to help people build these new apps.”
Free Our Feeds intends to have an independent foundation up and running by the end of the year. Berjon says if the nonprofit doesn’t raise enough funds, it will return the money.
