Free Our Feeds goals to assist Bluesky fulfill its original mission of decentralizing social media.
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Bluesky, the rival of It, should introduce a brand new model for social media itself, built on open source technology and allowing users to manage their very own data and share it freely across different web sites.
A brand new campaign called Free Our Feeds hopes to provide that vision a shot. On Monday, organizers announced they were working closely with Bluesky to create an independent, nonprofit foundation dedicated to expanding using the open source infrastructure on which the app relies. The campaign was organized by a handful of organizations focused on public interest technologies, including the Better Information Project, the Worker Agency and the Social Web Foundation.
The idea is to assist Bluesky achieve its original mission: it was originally conceived in 2019 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey as a research project on social media decentralization. The company hired Jay Graber, now Bluesky’s CEO, to develop a protocol, a typical language for computers to speak with one another, particularly for open source within the closed world of social media. The result was the AT protocol, short for Authentic Transfer. But after Elon Musk bought Twitter, his big plans to make the protocol more widely available disappeared from the corporate’s roadmap. Therefore, the team used the protocol to launch Bluesky in 2023.
Now Free Our Feeds desires to be certain that there is a strong ecosystem of other social apps based on the AT protocol which will potentially compete with Bluesky. The group is searching for an initial $4 million in crowdfunding for the project, a part of a broader goal of raising $30 million over the subsequent three years. The group will use the cash to ascertain the inspiration and construct a second social service using the AT protocol – a perhaps counterintuitive effort that would compete with Bluesky. However, his goal is to be certain that the protocol stays independent even when Bluesky one way or the other succumbs to corporate greed or pressure from enterprise capital-backed business interests. The idea is to provide users a spot to go if Bluesky ever decides to chop off developer access to data or experiences a takeover like Musk’s at X.
“It’s really up to the whims of these people to decide what social media universe we live in.”
The foundation will hire its own engineering team to work closely with Bluesky engineers to construct the brand new service, which it hopes to have operational by the top of the yr. The foundation may also use the cash to fund other projects from outside developers constructing on the protocol. “It is intended to be consistent with Bluesky but resilient should Bluesky become a hostile entity,” the group wrote in a paper outlining its priorities.
Bluesky didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Campaign organizers helped assemble a team of overseers who will make governance decisions for the inspiration’s creation, comparable to hiring a CEO and using the cash raised. These members, who call themselves “stewards,” include Mark Surman and Nabiha Syed, executive directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eli Pariser, founding father of Avaaz, and Mallory Knodel, executive director of the Social Web Foundation. The group also released an open letter on Monday signed by people supporting the project, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, actor Mark Ruffalo and Shoshana Zuboff, creator of The age of surveillance capitalism.
The long-term goal is to be certain that the longer term of social media can withstand the control of billionaires. Musk’s takeover of Twitter led to user exodus, an promoting boycott, and a cratering of security and moderation practices. Company owners like Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have an excessive amount of power to exert their very own influence on the platforms, Mozilla’s Surman said Forbes.
“It’s really up to the whims of these people to decide what social media universe we live in,” he said, describing the inspiration as a type of “rebel alliance” to tackle giants like X and Meta.
Meta illustrated this outsized power last week. Zuckerberg abruptly announced that the corporate would end its fact-checking program for Facebook and Instagram, blindsiding fact-checking organizations, and as a substitute depend on “community notes” from users to observe content, much like X’s Posts moderated. The move was criticized by some as a move toward President-elect Trump, who has long complained about alleged censorship of conservative viewpoints and threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison last yr.
Since Trump’s election, Bluesky has grown tremendously. Its user base has nearly doubled since October, from 13 million to 25 million, but remains to be a fraction of the three billion people on Facebook and a whole lot of tens of millions on X (the corporate has stopped disclosing user numbers since Musk took it private). The service has also amassed a tribe of X-Power users, including humorist Dril and billionaire Mark Cuban.
To generate buzz for Free Our Feeds, the group announced the announcement last week with cryptic posters that appeared throughout San Francisco and Brussels. The posters featured a cloudy blue sky and the URL for a Promotional websitewith a countdown clock until the beginning.
Surman said he and Mozilla desired to get entangled because he believes there’s actually an actual “opportunity to transform social media” after many others have tried within the last decade. “I’m all for it,” he said. “I really believe this has to happen.”
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