Technology advocates and celebrities are supporting it Launching our feedA campaign designed to “save social media from being taken over by billionaires”. The goal of the project is raise $30 million Over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT protocol, or the decentralized network that powers Bluesky.
The funds raised will be spent on launching a public interest foundation to support the project, as well as building a “freely hosted infrastructure” that will allow BlueSky users, developers, and researchers to access posted content. and will provide access to the data, “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”
Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes that “social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be controlled forever by a private social media company”.
“Bluesky's underlying technology, the AT protocol, can provide a new path to the social web. Yet as it stands, it is still venture-capital backed,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent path, so that the future of social media is free from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”
The free Our Feed will be led by nine patrons – including the Mozilla Foundation's Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman – who will oversee “key governance decisions” of the project.
Mastodon on Monday is also moving away from the sole proprietorship model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Elon Musk's X. Mastodon CEO Eugene Rochko announced That he would transfer ownership of the decentralized social network to a non-profit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by any one person.”
Correction, January 13: A previous version of the article misquoted a quote from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales due to an error by Free Our Feeds. The quote is from Sherif Elsayed-Ali.