Project to ‘free social media from billionaire control’ plans to challenge Musk and Zuck using open source Bluesky protocol: ‘It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars’
On Monday, a group of founders and tech activists announced the creation of a new fund focused on social media, aiming to raise $30 million to fund the development of the AT protocol, the underlying technology behind the growing social network Bluesky. While you may not recognize any of the “tech consultants and custodians” organizing Free Our Feeds, you will likely recognize many of the people who signed the open letter in support of the new fund: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, actor and activist. Signatories include Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow and musician Brian Eno.
Free Our Feed opens with a scathing condemnation of Facebook and X in their current forms, calling Mark Zuckerberg’s recent moves to abandon fact-checking and ease restrictions on hate speech “totally musky.”
The open letter continues the mission statement from there. “We are determined to free social media from the control of billionaires,” it says. “We know it will take three things: community, capital and control. And for the first time in history, there is a path to securing the future of social media in the public interest. The Bluesky team has created an incredible foundation for this social media vision. media that gives power and choice back to people through individual control and customization, sparking creativity and bringing back the joy of connecting online.
“However, they remain a for-profit company and, despite their best intentions, they will be subject to the same pressures that all businesses face: maximizing profits for their investors. We know that we will ultimately build a social media ecosystem that remains free of venture capital. and catching a billionaire will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars – and just like when we first founded cities, we laid out the first roads, and over time we created a network, and it all works as part of a social contract in which people get to share the benefits of access to these roads.”
Roads, in the writing analogy, is the AT protocol, an open-source infrastructure that powers Bluesky and could theoretically be used to create a new wave of interconnected social platforms offering non-corporate alternatives to the likes of Facebook and Linkedin. Free Our Feeds’ goal is to create a “public interest fund that will help ensure Bluesky’s underlying technology is fully resistant to billionaire takeovers.” This will include providing tools for developers to create “a variety of social apps based on open protocols to make social media a healthier, happier place.”
The open letter’s references to Bluesky’s creators, who ultimately fell prey to the whims of venture capital, may seem like a dig – and there is a fair amount of mistrust of Bluesky online due to its previous ties to Jack Dorsey and investment from a company called Blockchain Capital – but in fact, it’s in line with Bluesky’s mission statement from the beginning.
“One of Bluesky’s mottos is ‘the company is the future adversary,'” Bluesky developer Emily Liu explained in 2023. In recent months, CEO Jay Graber has also called the social network’s open-source design “billionaire-proof” and backed Free Our Feeds. on Monday.
Free Our Feeds’ website says the fund should be “in operation by the end of 2025,” but it is already soliciting donations through GoFundMe with a goal of $4 million “to establish the fund and get critical infrastructure up and running.”