As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to shape the social media landscape, so do international groups of tech entrepreneurs and advocates. A campaign was launched. To protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
preliminary Our Feeds are freeBluesky's underlying technology, AT Protocol, is intended to protect and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any one person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to create new interoperable social networks that run on the AT Protocol, and to build specific infrastructure to support these new platforms if they end up on Bluesky. The hands of billionaires.
Submissions are due one week after the campaign ends. It has been announced that fact-checking has been discontinued. and relax its content analysis rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg largely controls the company through super-voting shares, which make it difficult for activist shareholders to remove his shares or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky has seen a surge in users recently. Owner Elon Musk moved from X (formerly Twitter) after using the platform for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The right-wing AfD party In Germany.
actor Mark Ruffalo; Director Alex Winter; Author Cory Doctorow; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; Get started with our Feeds for free, supported by many notable names, including Mozilla Foundation President Mark Surman and more.
Independent technologist Robin Berjon, one of the project's “nine curators,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations he and other founding members had with social media and looking for ways to push for change in the digital infrastructure. work
“If you think about our road network, if all the roads are owned by one or two billionaires and they decide where to go, if they can tax anything, etc., then we're going to be in trouble,” Berjohn said. “And the digital infrastructure is, as you know, big and maybe like a road in your face,” he said. But it's exactly the same. It has exactly the same dynamic; It has exactly the same power concentration. So the essential thing is, What we're doing is digital infrastructure, by its very nature; for the public good; It will ensure that it is managed in the public interest.”
While the team acknowledges they share the same values as Bluesky, they believe the company could be under pressure from venture capital if it ends up under the control of a billionaire. They believe that users deserve alternatives backed by independent infrastructure. The team has been in contact with Bluesky; It is noted that the decentralized network supports their mission to be the AT protocol millionaire proof.
Free Our Feeds wants to raise $30 million over three years, hiring a small team and has an immediate goal of $4 million to build independent infrastructure.
“The goal of the operating infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol based on Bluesky remains open,” Berjon said. “They open sourced it; People can use it. But because there is only one big organization, That's Bluesky. There is no ability to counter-react. There is no one else to keep it open. They will not have a central location as they intend to run separate infrastructure from Bluesky that supports the entire network. The idea is really to continue to find that niche to become a credible actor and use that money to fund other applications.”
Berjon says the AT Protocol is currently mostly used to build BlueSky, but could also be used to build other types of social applications.
“Using the same infrastructure, you can build an Instagram analog, a Facebook analog, a Tiktok analog, or something that hasn't been invented yet,” he said. “This is actually the goal. I'm not copying things. In developing these new things; No need to recreate user accounts or storage systems. People can use their existing accounts with your new thing because they can interact with the AT protocol. So we really want to help people build this new application.”
Free Our Feeds aims to be an independent foundation up and running by the end of the year. Berjon said the money will be returned if the nonprofit doesn't raise enough funds.