tech advocates and celebrities are endorsing the launch of Free Our Feedsa campaign designed to “save social media from the capture of billionaires.” The project aims raise $30 million for three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powered by Bluesky.
Funds raised will go towards launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” that gives Bluesky users, developers and researchers access to published content and data.” no matter what the company decides to do in the future. future.”
Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes that “social infrastructure managed in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company” forever.
“Bluesky's underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could offer a new path for the social web. However, as it stands, it is still backed by venture capital,” Wikipedia co-founder and Free Our Feeds supporter Jimmy Wales said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky's underlying technology and put it on an independent path, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any company or group of billionaires.”
Free Our Feeds will be led by nine custodians, including Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation, who will oversee the project's “major governance decisions.”
Mastodon is also moving away from the single-ownership model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Elon Musk's x. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
