Free Our Feeds needs to construct a social media ecosystem ‘proof against billionaire affect’ Leave a comment

Expertise advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a marketing campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire seize.” The venture goals to increase $30 million over three years to assist the event of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized community powering Bluesky.

The raised funds will go towards launching a public curiosity basis to assist the venture, whereas creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky customers, builders, and researchers entry to the content material and knowledge posted “it doesn’t matter what the corporate decides to do sooner or later.”

Regardless of these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure run within the public curiosity can’t be ruled by a non-public social media firm” endlessly.

“Bluesky’s underlying expertise, the AT Protocol, may supply a brand new pathway for the social internet. But because it stands, it’s nonetheless venture-capital backed,” Wikipedia co-founder and Free Our Feeds supporter Jimmy Wales mentioned in an announcement. “This vital initiative goals to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying expertise and put it on an unbiased pathway, in order that the way forward for social media may be free of the whims of anybody firm or group of billionaires.”

Free Our Feeds will likely be led by 9 custodians — together with the Mozilla Basis’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who will oversee the venture’s “main governance selections.”

Mastodon can be shifting away from the one possession mannequin utilized by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko introduced that he’ll switch the possession of the decentralized social community to a nonprofit group as a result of “Mastodon shouldn’t be owned or managed by a single particular person.”