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As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would 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 were to end up in the hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced that it was dropping fact-checking and loosening its content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, which make it hard for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky saw a recent surge in users who migrated over from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
Free Our Feeds launched with the support of several notable names, including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and more.
Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the project’s nine “custodians,” told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds was the result of conversations that he and other founding members were having around exploring ways to push for change in the way social media and digital infrastructure works.
“If you think of our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires, and they could tax anything, decide who's allowed to go where, etc., then we would be in trouble,” Berjon said. “And digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously big and in your face as a road maybe, but it works in exactly the same way. It has the exact same dynamic, the exact same concentration of power. And so essentially, what we're doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which is by its nature, a public good, is governed in the public interest.”
Although the team acknowledges that it shares the same values as Bluesky, they believe that the company is susceptible to venture capital pressure, and that if it were to end up under a billionaire's control, users deserve alternative options backed by independent infrastructure. The team has been in contact with Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network is supportive of their mission to make the AT Protocol billionaire-proof.