As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international entrepreneurs and tech advocates have launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
The initiative, Free our streamsaims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by an individual or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to create a public interest foundation that will 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 ends up in the hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced it was abandoning data monitoring and relaxing content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg effectively controls the company through majority voting stock ownership, 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 migrating from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political causes, including right-wing party AfD in Germany.
Free Our Feeds was launched with the support of many notable names, including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, author Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman and others.
Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the nine “guardians” of the project, told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations he and other founding members had around exploring ways to push for change in the way with which social media and digital infrastructure factory.
“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 was allowed to go where, etc., then we’d be in trouble,” Berzon said. “And the digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously as big and in your face as a road maybe, but it works exactly the same way. It has exactly the same dynamics, exactly the same concentration of power. And so essentially, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which by its very nature is a public good, is governed by the public interest.”
While the team acknowledges it shares the same values as Bluesky, it believes the company is susceptible to venture capital pressure and that if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternatives backed by independent infrastructure. The team has reached out to Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network supports their mission to make the AT Protocol a billionaire.
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 the operational infrastructure is to ensure that the AT Protocol that underpins 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 force, there’s no one else to make sure it stays open. We intend to operate independent infrastructure from Bluesky that is compatible with them, that supports the entire network, so that they are not the only ones who have a significant place there. The idea is really to continue to raise money to become a credible actor in this space and use that money to essentially fund other apps.”
Berjon says the AT protocol is currently mostly used to build BlueSky, but it could also be used to build other types of social networking applications.
“Using the same infrastructure, you could create 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 copying stuff. And for 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 AT Protocol interoperable. And so we really want to help people build these new apps.”
Free Our Feeds intends 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.
