As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape 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 Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced that it was dropping fact-checking and loosening its 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, which make it hard for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky saw a recent surge in users who migrated over from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Free our Feeds launched with the support of several notable names, including actor Mark Ruffallo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and more.
Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the project’s nine “custodians,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations that he and other founding members were having around exploring ways to push for change in the way social media and digital infrastructure works.
“If you think of our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires, and they could tax anything, decide who’s allowed to go where, etc, then we would be in trouble,” Berjon said. “And digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously big and in your face as a road maybe, but it works in exactly the same way. It has the exact same dynamic, the exact same concentration of power. And so essentially, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which is by its nature, a public good, is governed in the public interest.”
Although the team acknowledges that it shares the same values as Bluesky, they believe that the company is susceptible to venture capital pressure, and that if it were to end up under a billionaire’s control, users deserve alternative options backed by independent infrastructure. The team has been in contact with Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network is supportive of their 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 goal of operating infrastructure is to make sure that the AT protocol that underlies Bluesky can remain open,” Berjon said. “They’ve open sourced it, people can use it. But because there’s only one big entity, that’s Bluesky, there’s no countervailing power, there’s no one else to make sure it stays open. We intend to operate independent infrastructure from Bluesky that’s compatible with them, that supports the entire network, so that it’s not only them having a major place there. The idea really is to continue raising money to become a credible actor in that space, and to use that money to essentially fund other applications.”
Berjon says the AT Protocol is currently mostly being used to build BlueSky, but it could also be used to build other types of social apps.
“Using the same infrastructure, you could build 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 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 their 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 intends to have the independent foundation established and running by the end of the year. Berjon says that if the non-profit doesn’t raise enough funds, it will return the money.