'Free Our Info' campaign aims to protect Bluesky's technology from billionaires

As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates have launched a movement to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.

The initiative, called “Free Our Feeds,” aims to protect Bluesky's underlying technology, the AT protocol, and use it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by individuals or companies, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to establish a public interest foundation to fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT protocol and to build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky eventually becomes a billionaire hands.

A week ago, Meta announced it was abandoning fact-checking and relaxing its content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of supervoting stock, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or push for change. Meanwhile, Bluesky found that after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote Donald Trump's presidential campaign and other political causes, including Germany's right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party After that, there has been a recent surge in users migrating from X (formerly Twitter).

The launch of Free Our Feeds has been supported by many well-known people, including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mark Surman, etc.

Robin Berjon, an independent technology expert and one of the project's nine “custodians,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was a conversation between him and other founding members around exploring ways to drive change in the way social media and digital infrastructure are used. result. work.

“If you think about our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires who could tax everything, decide who was allowed to go where and so on, then we would be in trouble,” Bell said Hong said. “As you know, digital infrastructure is obviously not big and it's not like a road, but it works exactly the same way. It has the exact same dynamics, the exact same concentration of power. So, in essence, we What is being done is ensuring that this digital infrastructure is of a public interest nature and is managed in the public interest.”

While the team acknowledges it shares Bluesky's values, they believe the company is vulnerable to venture capital pressure and that if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternatives backed by independent infrastructure choose. The team has been in contact with Bluesky and noted that the decentralized network supports their mission to make the AT protocol billionaire-proof.

Free Our Feeds hopes to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of raising $4 million to hire a small team and build independent infrastructure.

“The goal of the operational infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol behind Bluesky remains open,” Berjon said. “They've open sourced it and people can use it. But because there's only one big entity, and that's Bluesky, there's no countervailing force, there's no one else to make sure it stays open. We're going to operate Bluesky independently that's compatible with them and supports the entire network infrastructure so that it's not just them that has a big presence there. The idea is actually to continue to raise capital and become a credible player in this space and use that capital to fund other applications.”

Berjon said the AT protocol is currently mainly used to build BlueSky, but it can 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, you know, something that hasn't been invented yet,” he said. “That's really the goal. It's not just copying things. When you invent these new things, you don't need to reinvent user accounts or storage systems and so on. People can use their existing accounts with your new things because It's interoperable with the AT protocol, so we really want to help people build these new applications.”

Free Our Feeds plans to have an independent foundation up and running by the end of the year. Belhoon said if the nonprofit doesn't raise enough money, it will return the funds.