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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates started a campaign To protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
initiative, Our feed is freeIt aims to protect BlueSky’s underlying 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.
The initiative aims to establish a public interest foundation that will finance 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 hands of millionaires.
The campaign meta comes a week later announced that it was dropping fact-checking and loosening its content control rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg largely controls the company through ownership of super-voting shares, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or push for change. It also comes as Bluesky has seen a recent surge in users Owner Elon Musk moved from X (formerly Twitter) after using the platform to promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political causes. Right-wing AfD party In Germany
Get our feeds free with support from a number of notable names, including actor Mark Ruffalo, director Alex Winter, author Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman and more.
Robin Bergon, an independent technologist and one of the nine “custodians” of the project, told TechCrunch that Free Hour Feed was the result of conversations he and other founding members were having exploring ways to transform social media and digital infrastructure. works
“If you think about our road network, if all the roads are owned by one or two billionaires, and they can tax anything, decide who goes where, etc., then we’re going to be in trouble,” Barzon said. “And digital infrastructure, as you know, is obviously not as big and in-your-face as a road, but it works exactly the same way. It has exactly the same dynamics, the same density of power. And so basically, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital Infrastructure, which by its very nature, is a public good, is operated in the public interest.”
While the team admits it shares the same values as Bluesky, they believe the company is susceptible to venture capital pressure, and if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternative options supported by an independent infrastructure. The team contacted Bluesky, noting that the decentralized network was supporting their goal of making the AT protocol billionaire-proof.
Free Our Feed seeks 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 the operating infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol underlying Bluesky can be open,” Barzon said. “They made it open source, people can use it. But since there is only one major entity, Bluesky, there is no countervailing force, no one else to make sure it stays open. We want to operate independent infrastructure from Bluesky that is compatible with them, that supports the entire network, so that they don’t just have one main location. The idea is really to continue to raise money to be a credible actor in that space, and that money to basically fund other applications.”
Barzon says the AT protocol is currently mostly used to build BlueSky, but it could also be used to build other types of social apps.
“Using the same infrastructure, you can create an Instagram analog, a Facebook analog, a TikTok analog or, you know, things that haven’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that’s actually the goal. It doesn’t just copy things. And to invent these new things, you don’t have to reinvent user accounts or storage systems. People can just use their existing accounts with your new thing, because it’s interoperable with the AT protocol. And so we really want to help build these new applications.”
Free Our Feed seeks to establish and operate independent foundations by the end of the year. Berjon said if the nonprofit doesn’t raise enough funds, it will return the money.
