Free Our Feeds wants to build a social media ecosystem ‘resistant to billionaire influence’

Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a run designed to “save societal media from billionaire capture.” The task aims to raise $30 million implicit 3 years to enactment the improvement of a societal media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, oregon the decentralized web powering Bluesky.

The raised funds volition spell toward launching a nationalist involvement instauration to enactment the project, portion creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers entree to the contented and information posted “no substance what the institution decides to bash successful the future.”

Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure tally successful the nationalist involvement cannot beryllium governed by a backstage societal media company” forever.

“Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could connection a caller pathway for the societal web. Yet arsenic it stands, it is inactive venture-capital backed,” Wikipedia co-founder and Free Our Feeds protagonist Jimmy Wales said successful a statement. “This important inaugural aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying exertion and enactment it connected an autarkic pathway, truthful that the aboriginal of societal media tin beryllium freed from the whims of immoderate 1 institution oregon radical of billionaires.”

Free Our Feeds volition beryllium led by 9 custodians — including the Mozilla Foundation’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who volition oversee the project’s “major governance decisions.”

Mastodon is besides moving distant from the azygous ownership exemplary utilized by societal platforms similar Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that helium volition transportation the ownership of the decentralized societal web to a nonprofit enactment due to the fact that “Mastodon should not beryllium owned oregon controlled by a azygous individual.”

With Meta making drastic changes to its contented moderation policy, and X’s translation nether Musk’s ownership, the Free Our Feeds task couldn’t travel astatine a amended clip — adjacent if it mightiness instrumentality immoderate clip for its efforts to travel to fruition.