Free Our Feeds
freeourfeeds.com
Let's take social media away from billionaire capture.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

screenshot of bluesky post with text: It’s time to reclaim social media. Billionaires & venture capital shouldn’t control our digital lives. #FreeOurFeeds is raising $4M to build a public-interest alternative. Chip in today to make it happen. January 13, 2025 at 2:04 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it’s a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

…

Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    3·
    21 hours ago

    No, like I wrote in my edit: I recommend reading up on the ATproto design. It’s not necessarily bad if your goal is to create a single global town-square (i.e. Twitter like) microblogging website, but given this design goal, it will always be dominated by a single entity controlling the app view, and that is likely to be Bluesky itself.

    $4m is not nearly enough to wrestle control away from Bluesky, and even if that would succeed you would have not fundamentally changed the situation but just replaced one single controlling entity with another.

    • chobeat@lemmy.ml
      21·
      21 hours ago

      This scenario would also be aligned with the goals of this initiative. I don’t think they see a problem with it. The majority of the signatories are techno-optimist liberals who believe the good tech bros should be in control of society’s discourse to prevent the American empire from collapsing. Billionaries are evil because they are enemy of the status quo.