Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save 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, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.
The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”
After starting as a research project under former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky became an independent company in 2021 and went on to create the AT Protocol, an open-source infrastructure that aims to create a social ecosystem with interoperable apps. Bluesky built its own social network atop the framework, raising millions in funds and attracting a growing number of users.
Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company” forever.
“Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web. Yet as it stands, it is still venture-capital backed,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, the executive director at the Future of Technology Institute, said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”
Free Our Feeds will be led by nine custodians — including the Mozilla Foundation’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who will oversee the project’s “major governance decisions.”
Mastodon is also moving away from the single ownership model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer the ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
With Meta making drastic changes to its content moderation policy, and X’s transformation under Musk’s ownership, the Free Our Feeds project couldn’t come at a better time — even if it might take some time for its efforts to come to fruition.
Correction, January 13th: A previous version of the article misattributed a quote to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales due to an error from Free Our Feeds. The quote is from Sherif Elsayed-Ali.
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Emma Roth