Comment on Free Our Feeds campaign launches to ‘liberate social media’ through new ecosystem

A new, independent foundation called ‘Free Our Feeds’ has launched a campaign aiming to raise $30 million to “liberate social media.” The group, which is overseen by nine custodians, wants to reach the sum within three years. The goal is to “create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.” The plan is to turn Bluesky’s underlying technology – the AT Protocol – “into something more powerful than a single app.” Free Our Feeds is seperate from the up-and-coming social media site Bluesky, but says that the team behind the company is supportive of the goals of the campaign. Campaign signatures To begin making a dent in the monetary goals, the group is first seeking to raise $4 million to create the foundation and “get critical infrastructure up and running so that we’re not dependent on billionaires.” A number of people are cited on the website as having signed the campaign including actor Mark Ruffalo, the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, a member of the UK House of Lords Rosie Boycott, and several more. What is the Free Our Feeds campaign? The campaign shares a group’s hope of building a social network ecosystem that will remain free from venture capital and billionaire capture. “With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square,” the group has written online. The open letter cites how the group are “former Twitter users who cherished the platform and the communities we built there over the years,” but states they saw “the quality of our feeds decline as one person took over what we had believed to be a global public square, using it for his own political and business objectives.” The campaign effort will see the funds, if achieved, be spent on launching a public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky’s underlying tech “fully resistant to billionaire capture.” As well as this, the money will go towards building “independently hosted infrastructure (a second ‘relay’) so that Bluesky users, developers, and researchers always have full access to the stream of content and data no matter what the company decides to do in future.” The donations will also “fund developers so they can build a wealth of social applications on top of open protocols to make social media a healthier and happier place. Featured Image: Via Free Our Feeds campaign The post Free Our Feeds campaign launches to ‘liberate social media’ through new ecosystem appeared first on ReadWrite.