“Free Our Feeds” wants to save Bluesky and social networks from billionaires
Bluesky has grown strongly recently, but the promised protection against a takeover, as with Twitter, has not yet been in place. This is set to change soon.
(Image: Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock.com)
Celebrities from the tech and culture scene are supporting a new initiative that aims to build an ecosystem for social networks that is protected from billionaires, based on the foundation under the short messaging service Bluesky. This emerges from the presentation of the project called “Free Our Feeds”, whose goals are being promoted by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo, author Cory Doctorow and MEP Alexandra Geese (Green Party), among others. One of the declared aims is to set up an independent infrastructure that allows people to access content from Bluesky without having to rely on the US start-up's servers.
The organization also wants to finance the development of social applications that are all based on the AT protocol and are connected to each other. The protocol has so far been the basis for Bluesky in particular. In principle, those responsible are planning a network of services based on this protocol that is comparable to the so-called Fediverse. This is based on a different protocol, ActivityPub, and the two are even compatible with each other. “Free Our Feeds” does not want people to have to choose between the two protocols and the services based on them anyway. Instead, the aim is to achieve interoperability between open social networks through collaboration.
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As justification for the ambitious goal of an independent, open network that no billionaire can simply take over, those responsible now refer to the experiences following the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk. They had noticed the negative consequences on their accounts: “We can never let that happen again.” The Bluesky team has laid an “incredible foundation” for the vision of a social network that gives control back to users. Ultimately, however, this is once again a company that could come under financial pressure. This is why services must now be developed based on their technology that will still work if Bluesky is taken over, for example.
The organization is now collecting donations for its declared goal, with a target of four million US dollars. Compared to the budget of the Facebook group Meta, for example, this is an immensely low sum. There, too, the billionaire in charge has recently caused frustration among some users by announcing changes, of course. At the same time, the launch of “Free Our Feeds” also reminds us that the Fediverse is already an ecosystem of very different social networks that are linked to each other via a protocol. By far the best-known part of this is the short messaging service Mastodon, whose further development is now to be put on a more secure legal footing.
(mho)
