Free Our Feeds

We are former Twitter users who cherished the platform and the communities we built there over the years. However, we’ve also seen 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.

We can’t let that happen ever again.

We are determined to free social media from billionaire control.

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 share the benefits of access to those roads.

That’s why today we’re supporting a group of the world's most experienced open technology experts in their effort to get this off the ground.

We are launching a huge effort to raise $30 million dollars over three years and to get there we’re starting today by seeking to raise $4m to create the foundation and get critical infrastructure up and running so that we’re not dependent on billionaires.

The funds will be raised to:

• Launch a public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky’s underlying tech (the AT Protocol) fully resistant to billionaire capture.
• Build 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.
• 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.

It’s time to liberate social media.

With your help we can actually do it.

Can you donate to make this a reality?

• Sean Martin McDonald, Partner, Digital Public
• Alix Dunn, CEO of Computer Says Maybe
• Tanya O'Carroll, Independent Tech Expert and co-founder of People vs. Big Tech
• Craig Newmark, Entrepreneur and philanthropist
• Steve Marmel, Writer and Comedian
• Lise Mayer, Writer
• Ana Marie Cox, Journalist and Author
• Celia Zolynski, Professor of Law, Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
• Carissa Veliz, Associate Professor, University of Oxford and author of ‘Privacy is Power’
• Anil Dash, Technology executive and Entrepreneur
• Marc Silver, Filmmaker
• David Carroll, Professor of Media Design, Parsons and Data-rights Advocate
• Fred Wellman, Media Personality and Political Strategist
• Amber Massie-Blomfeld, Writer and Theatre Producer
• Immo Klink, Photographer and Campaigner
• Monique Roffey, Author
• Marcus Lyon, Artist
• Max Von Thun, Director of Europe and Transatlantic Partnerships at the Open Markets Institute
• Katarzyna Szymielewicz, CEO of Panoptykon Foundation
• Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder
• Adele Zeynep Walton, Journalist and author of ‘Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World’
• Magali Payen, Founder of On Est Prêt
• David Chavalarias, Researcher
• Tabitha Goldstaub, Executive Director at Innovate Cambridge
• Eric Passoja, Actor
• Roger Hartley, Founder of Bureau of Silly Ideas
• Beadie Finzie, Co-director of The Doc Society
• Ed Gillespie, Writer and Speaker
• Malcolm Garrett MBE, Founder of Images&Co
• Federico Gaggio, Independent Strategist
• Jo Syz, Photographer and Filmmaker
• Bette Adriaanse, Writer and Artist
• Laline Paull, Author
• Rachel Coldicutt OBE, Executive Director of Careful Trouble
• Adam Leon Smith, Chair, BCS Fellows Technical Advisory Group
• Peter Wells, Technologist
• Matt Black, Musician and co-founder of Coldcut/Ninja Tune
• Paul Keller, Director of Policy at Open Future Foundation
• Michelle Meagher, Anti-monopoly expert and writer
• Roc Sandford, Artist and Writer
• John C. Havens, Author and Journalist
• Pulse, Social psychologist
• Maria Farrell, Writer
• Marietje Schaake, Author of "The Tech Coup"
• Louis Barclay, Fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University
• Joe Lo Truglio, Filmmaker and actor
• Bianca Wylie, Writer and public technology advocate

We’re raising funds to launch a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire (including Bluesky itself).

Bluesky is built on values we share, by people we admire. However, founders are not companies. They will come under the same pressure all businesses face to maximize return to their investors - and, as we have seen, their leadership can change in the long term. To make the vision we share with Bluesky a reality, there needs to be alternative options for users to choose from in the first place backed up by independent infrastructure.

Free Our Feeds is independent from Bluesky, but we have been in contact with the Bluesky team and they are supportive of the goals of the campaign. This is about developing a social media ecosystem on Bluesky's AT Protocol, which is ultimately what Bluesky wants as well.

Free Our Feeds want to make sure that the open social media infrastructure that Bluesky has built remains operated in the public interest. As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said “billionaire-proofing” relies on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and making it their own. Bluesky’s great work to date and good intentions are clear, however social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company in the long term.

It will take $30M over three years for us to realize our three step plan to free our feeds from billionaire control:

• Establish a public-interest foundation to support Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, to become independent and globally standardized.
• Build independent infrastructure, such as a second “relay,” guaranteeing Bluesky users and developers have uninterrupted access to data streams, regardless of corporate decisions.
• Fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols, fostering healthier and more equitable online spaces.

The developers’ fund will re-grant to the community of innovators who can build the solutions we need to improve our social web (from content moderation services for under resourced languages to recommender systems that are optimized for what people actually want to see, and new apps and experiences that we can’t yet imagine).

Bluesky the platform (and company) can be thought of separately from Bluesky’s underlying technology (its protocol - known as the “AT Protocol”). “Protocols” may sound nerdy, but they’re the beating heart of all the core technology infrastructure we rely on today. For example, it is open protocols that allow anyone on the internet to build and host their own website.

Now we have a working and maintained open protocol for social media that is usable by millions and can scale to billions. Bluesky’s AT Protocol provides a ready-made foundation for interoperability, customization, and local control — ideas that have long been discussed but rarely implemented at scale, let alone put in the hands of end-users. To ensure its continued development in the public interest and remove any risk of future conflict of interest the AT Protocol must be under public governance, separate from Bluesky as a company. And this must be true not only of the theoretical specification of the protocol but also of the infrastructure required to operate it as well as of the ecosystem of people who build apps on top of it.

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.

We intend to have it up and running by the end of 2025.

Free Our Feeds is overseen by a group of 9 Custodians, who have approval authority over major governance decisions, including final approval of the Foundation’s leadership and setup, and distribution of funds to that entity when it is ready.

The project is operating initially under fiscal sponsorship from Development Gateway, a US-based 501(c)(3) with expertise in international financial operations, who will hold any funds raised from the crowdfunder.

ActivityPub is a W3C standard that enables interoperability between platforms like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, Threads and others. AT and ActivityPub should not be either/or options. Our vision is that interoperability between open social media platforms is achieved through collaboration. This campaign can organize developer communities, fund product development, support testing that improves bridging and native protocol interoperability.

The Social Web Foundation convenes the network of platforms connected via ActivityPub. SWF's executive director is involved in the #FreeOurFeeds campaign as a custodian and you can read more about in her blog post here.