A new initiative aimed at liberating social media from the grasp of wealthy tycoons is gearing up to challenge Musk and Zuckerberg by utilizing Bluesky's open source protocol. The project's leaders estimate that achieving their goals will require years of effort and an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia, actor Mark Ruffalo, and several others have shown their support for Free Our Feeds.

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A cadre of tech founders and activists announced a new social-media focused foundation on Monday with the goal of raising $30 million to fund development of AT Protocol, the underlying technology powering growing social media network Bluesky. While you may not recognize any of the "technical advisors and custodians" organizing Free Our Feeds, you'll likely recognize plenty of the folks who signed an open letter in support of the new foundation: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, writer Cory Doctorow and musician Brian Eno are all among the signatories.

Free Our Feed opens with a strong denouncement of Facebook and X in their current forms, calling Mark Zuckerberg's recent moves to ditch fact checkers and ease up on restrictions on hate speech "going full Musk."

The open letter continues with the mission statement, declaring, "Our goal is to liberate social media from the grip of billionaires." It emphasizes that achieving this requires three essential components: community, capital, and control. "For the first time," it notes, "we have a clear route to ensure that social media serves the public good. The Bluesky team has established a remarkable groundwork for this vision, empowering individuals with control and personalization, igniting creativity, and restoring the joy of online connections."

"Nonetheless, they are still a commercial enterprise, and regardless of their noble goals, they will inevitably encounter the same challenges that all businesses do: the need to optimize returns for their investors. It is clear that in order to create a sustainable social network ecosystem that is free from the influence of venture capital and wealthy individuals, it will require years of effort and substantial financial investment—similar to the early days when we established towns, constructed initial roads, and gradually developed a network that functioned under a social contract, allowing everyone to enjoy the advantages of access to those roads."

The pathways described in the letter's metaphor represent the AT Protocol, an open-source framework that underpins Bluesky and has the potential to facilitate the creation of a new generation of interconnected social networks, providing non-commercial options to platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The mission of Free Our Feeds is to establish a "public interest foundation aimed at ensuring that the technology behind Bluesky remains impervious to the influence of wealthy individuals." This initiative will include providing financial support to developers tasked with creating "a variety of social applications built on open protocols, with the goal of transforming social media into a more positive and enjoyable environment."

The open letter's references to Bluesky's creators eventually falling victim to the whims of venture capital may sound like a dig—and there's ample mistrust online around Bluesky thanks to its former connection to Jack Dorsey and investment from a company called Blockchain Capital—but it's actually in-line with Bluesky's mission statement since the beginning.

"One of Bluesky's mottos is 'the company is a future adversary,'" explained Bluesky developer Emily Liu in 2023. In recent months CEO Jay Graber has also called the social network's open source design "billionaire-proof," and endorsed Free Our Feeds on Monday.

The Free Our Feeds website says the foundation should be "up and running by the end of 2025," but it's already collecting donations via a GoFundMe, with a goal of $4 million "to create the foundation and get critical infrastructure up and running."