Tech advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feed, a campaign aimed at “saving social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, a decentralized network powered by Bluesky.
The funds raised will be used to launch a public interest foundation to support the project, and will provide Bluesky users, developers, and researchers with access to the content and data they post, regardless of what decisions the company makes. We plan to build an independently hosted infrastructure that will enable future. “
Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes that “private social media companies cannot forever control social infrastructure that operates in the public interest.”
“Bluesky's underlying technology, the AT protocol, has the potential to provide new avenues for the social web, but as it stands, it remains venture capital-backed,” said Free, co-founder of Wikipedia. Our Feeds supporter Jimmy Wales said in a statement. “This important effort aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent path, ensuring that the future of social media is free from the whims of a single company or group of billionaires. It becomes liberating.”
Free Our Feed will be led by nine administrators, including Naviha Syed and Mark Surman from the Mozilla Foundation, who will oversee “key governance decisions” for the project.
Mastodon is also moving away from the single ownership model used by social platforms such as Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Elon Musk's X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Roszko announced that he would be transferring ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should.” It is not owned or controlled by a single individual. ”
