As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international technology entrepreneurs and their advocates are launching a campaign to protect social media from billionaire control and influence. Raised.
The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to secure and leverage Bluesky's underlying technology, the AT protocol, to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single person or company, including Bluesky itself. The purpose is
The goal of this effort is to establish a public interest foundation that will fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT protocol and support these new platforms, even if Bluesky ultimately falls into the world. is to build an independent infrastructure. Billionaire's hand.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced it was eliminating fact-checking and relaxing content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through ownership of super-voting stock, and activist shareholders have threatened to oust him or make changes. It is difficult to promote. Bluesky also recently launched an X (formerly Twitter This is in light of the rapid increase in users migrating from ).
Free our Feed is backed by notable celebrities including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, author Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Mozilla Foundation chairman Mark Thurman. It was raised.
Robin Bergeon, an independent technologist and one of the project's nine “custodians,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feed was created by him and other founding members to help shape the state of social media and digital infrastructure. He said it was the result of conversations he had while searching for ways to drive change. It works.
“If you think about our road system, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires, and they could tax everything and decide who could go where. If that's the case, we're going to be in trouble,” Bergeon said. “And, you know, digital infrastructure is obviously not as big as the roads, it’s not as big as the roads in front of us, but it works in exactly the same way. It has the exact same dynamics, the exact same concentration of power. So essentially what we're doing is ensuring that this digital infrastructure, which is essentially a public good, is managed in the public interest.
The team acknowledges that the company shares the same values as Bluesky, but that the company is sensitive to venture capital pressure and that if it were to come under the control of a billionaire, it would believes in the right to alternative options supported by independent infrastructure. The team contacted Bluesky and pointed out that the decentralized network supports their mission to make the AT protocol billionaire-proof.
Free Our Feeds hopes to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of $4 million to hire a small team and build an independent infrastructure.
“The goal of infrastructure operations is to ensure that Bluesky's underlying AT protocol remains open,” said Berjon. “They've open sourced it and people can use it, but there's no power to fight it because there's only one big organization, Blue Sky, and no one else is going to be able to keep it going. We will therefore operate an independent infrastructure from Bluesky that is compatible with and supports the entire network. The real idea is to continue to raise money to become a credible actor in the field and use that money to basically fund other applications. is.”
According to Berjon, the AT protocol is currently primarily used to build BlueSky, but it could also be used to build other types of social apps.
“You can use the same infrastructure to build an Instagram analog, a Facebook analog, a Tiktok analog, or something that hasn’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that's the real goal. We're not just copying things. And when we invent these new things, we don't have to reinvent user accounts or storage systems or whatever. It's interoperable, so users just need to use their existing accounts for new ones. So we want to help people build these new applications.”
Free Our Feeds plans to establish and operate an independent foundation by the end of the year. Bergeon said the funds will be returned if the nonprofit doesn't raise enough money.