Mark Zuckerberg‘s now-infamous suck-up video has sparked a $30 million movement to “save social media from billionaire capture.”
A group of tech advocates and celebrities that includes Mark Ruffalo, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Nabiha Syed, Mozilla Foundation President Mark Surman, New_Public Co-Director Deepti Doshi, and Future of Technology Institute Executive Director Sherif Elsayed-Ali (among many others) has banded together to create an “independently hosted [social media] infrastructure” built on Bluesky‘s AT Protocol.
The initiative is called Free Our Feeds, and it wants to raise $30 million to “create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.”
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“With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square,” the group wrote on Free Our Feeds’ official website. “Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”
The AT Protocol is the open-source technology upon which Bluesky is built. It bones were originally developed by an independent research group within Twitter, back when co-founder Jack Dorsey was still CEO (and when it was still called Twitter…). When Dorsey left and founded Bluesky, it developed–and continues to develop–the full-fledged version, which aims to allow for decentralized social networking.
You’ve probably most commonly heard “decentralized” in reference to cryptocurrency, which be created by anyone and are not controlled by any country or financial institution. Proponents of decentralized social media networks have similar goals.
“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,” Elsayed-Ali 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.”
The initiative’s goal is to give Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted on its platform “no matter what the company decides to do in the future,” The Verge reports.
Free Our Feeds says the $30 million it raises will go to three things:
- Establishing a public-interest foundation to make the AT Protocol technology “independent and globally standardized.”
- Build independent infrastructure that will interact with Bluesky, “guaranteeing Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams, regardless of corporate decisions.”
- And finally, fund independent developers to create apps built on the AT Protocol, “fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.”
As The Verge points out, the folks behind Free Our Feeds are not the only people thinking about who controls social media. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced Monday that he is transferring ownership of the silo-model social network to a nonprofit because “Mastodon should be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
We don’t know if anything concrete will come of the initiative, but it’s worth considering this all comes as Zuckerberg (and thus Meta) is under fire for bowing to the incoming Trump administration, X continues to decline in Elon Musk‘s pocket, and TikTok is on the verge of being banned. Maybe it is time for something new.
