Project to 'free social media from billionaire control' plans to take on Musk and Zuck using Bluesky's open source protocol: 'It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars'

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 picks up the mission statement from there. "We are determined to free social media from billionaire control," it states. "We know it will take three things: community, capital, control. And for the first time ever there is a pathway to secure the future of social media in the public interest. The Bluesky team has built an incredible foundation for this vision of social media that gives power and choice back to people through individual control and customization, sparking creativity and bringing joy back into connecting online.

"However, they remain a commercial company, and despite their best intentions they will come under the same pressures all businesses face: to maximise return to their investors. We know that to ultimately build out a social network ecosystem that will remain free from venture capital and billionaire capture it will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars—and much like when we first started towns, we made the first roads, and over time we built out a network, all operating as part of a social contract where people get to the share the benefits of access to those roads."

The roads in the letter's analogy are the AT Protocol, the open source infrastructure that powers Bluesky and could theoretically be used to build a new wave of interconnected social platforms, offering non-corporate alternatives to the likes of Facebook and Linkedin. Free Our Feeds' goal is to create a "public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky's underlying tech fully resistant to billionaire capture." That will involve offering funds to developers to build "a wealth of social applications on top of open protocols to make social media a healthier and happier place."

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."