A new campaign aims to protect social media from billionaires using Bluesky’s underlying technology

As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international entrepreneurs and technology advocates… Launched a campaign To protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.

initiative, Free our feedaims to protect Bluesky’s core technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to create a public interest organization 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 world. The hands of billionaires.

The campaign comes a week after the Meta She announced that she would give up fact-checking And relax its content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg primarily controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as well Bluesky has recently seen a surge in users who migrated from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political issues, including The right-wing Alternative for Germany party In Germany.

Free Our Feeds was launched with the support of several high-profile names, including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and more.

Robin Bergon, a freelance technologist and one of the nine “guardians” of the project, told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations he and the other founding members had about exploring ways to push for change in the way social media and digital infrastructure work. He works.

“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 is allowed to go where, etc., we would be in trouble,” Bergon said. “And the digital infrastructure, you know, is not as big obviously and maybe looks in your face like a road, but it works exactly the same way. It has the same dynamic, the same concentration of power. And basically what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which by its very nature is a public good , subject to the public interest.

Although the team admits it shares the same values ​​as Bluesky, they believe the company is vulnerable to venture capital pressure, and that if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternative options backed by independent infrastructure. The team has been in contact with Bluesky, stating that the decentralized network supports their mission to make the AT protocol billionaire-proof.

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 running the infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol that underpins Bluesky can remain open,” Bergon said. “They’ve open sourced, and people can use it. But because there’s only one big entity, Bluesky, there’s no countervailing power, and no one else to make sure it stays open. We intend to run an independent Bluesky infrastructure that’s compatible with them, and supports the entire network, so that Not just to have a major place there, the idea is really to continue to raise money to become a credible player in this space, and to use that money to essentially fund other applications.

The AT protocol is currently mostly used to create BlueSky, but it can also be used to create other types of social applications, Bergon says.

“Using the same infrastructure, you can create an analog of Instagram, an analog of Facebook, an analog of Tiktok, or, you know, things that haven’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that’s actually the point. It’s not just copying things. And when you invent these new things, you don’t have to reinvent user accounts or storage systems, etc. People can just use their existing accounts with the new thing, because it’s interoperable.” With the AT protocol and so we really want to help people build these new applications.

Free Our Feeds intends to have an independent organization up and running by the end of the year. Bergon says if the nonprofit doesn’t raise enough money, it will return the money.