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As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to dominate the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
The initiative, Free our Feedsaims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and to support it in creating 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 establish a public interest foundation that will finance the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build an independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, although Bluesky end up in the hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced that he was abandoning fact-checking and loosening their content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky has seen a recent surge in users which migrated from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political causes, including right party AfD in Germany.
Free our Feeds launched with the support of many notable names, including actor Mark Ruffallo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and others.
Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the nine “custodians” of the project, told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations he and other founding members had about discovering ways to push change in the way of social media and digital infrastructure. works
“If you think about our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires, and they could tax anything, decide who is allowed to go where, etc., then we would be in trouble,” said Berjon. “And the digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously big and in your face like a street maybe, but it works in exactly the same way. It has the same exact dynamics, the same concentration of power. And so essentially, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which is by its very nature a public good, is governed in the public interest.”
Although the team recognizes that they share the same values as Bluesky, they believe that the company is susceptible to the pressure of venture capital, and that if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, the users deserve alternative options supported by independent infrastructure. The team has been in contact with Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network is supportive of its mission to make the AT protocol billionaire-proof.
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 operational infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol that underlies Bluesky can be opened,” said Berjon. “They have opened it, people can use it. But because there is only one big entity, this is Bluesky, there is no compensation power, there is no one to ensure that it remains open. We intend to operate infrastructure independent of Bluesky which is compatible with them, which supports the whole network, because they are not the only ones to have a major place. The idea is really to continue to collect money to become a credible actor in that space, and to use that money to essentially finance others applications”.
Berjon says the AT Protocol is currently mostly used to build BlueSky, but it could also be used to build other types of social apps.
“Using the same infrastructure, you can build an analog of Instagram, an analog of Facebook, an analog of Tiktok, or, you know, things that haven’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that’s really the goal. It’s not just to copy things. And in inventing these new things, you don’t need to reinvent user accounts or storage systems, etc. People can just use the so existing accounts with your new thing, because it’s interoperable with the AT protocol. And so we really want to help people build these new applications.”
Free Our Feeds aims to have the 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.
