Campaign

Free Our Feeds

A campaign for people-powered, open social media

Launched in January 2025, the campaign set an ambitious target to raise enough funds to back the development of an ecosystem of applications and users for open social media, focused initially on the AT Protocol, which underpins Bluesky. Our funding targets include:

  • $500,000 in order to kickstart the development of key technical components, define a strategy and help build community around atproto development and use

  • $4,000,000 to launch an independent public tech foundation to participate in building out ATProto as an open social standard, build and operate key, shared components in ATProto, such as an independent relay, and shared tools for content moderation

  • $30,000,000 over several years to help create a mature open social standard, provide financial backing for a range of applications, and secure and sustain a core commons of technologies to assist both developers and communities

As of July 2025, we have raised close to $330,000, the majority of which comes from more than 2,150 individual donations.

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An open letter from our launch

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 have 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 therefore be raised to:

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

  2. 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, and

  3. 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.

Signatories

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

Sean Martin McDonald, Partner, Digital Public

Alix Dunn, CEO, Computer Says Maybe

Tanya O'Carroll, independent technology 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

Adete Zeynep Walton, journalist and author of ‘Logging Off: the Human Cost of our Digital World'

Magali Payen, founder of On Est Pret 

David Chavalarias, researcher

Tabitha Gotdstaub, Executive Director at Innovate Cambridge 

Eric Passoja, actor

Roger Hartley, founder of Bureau of Silly ldeas

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, Harvard University

Joe Lo Truglio, filmmaker and actor

Bianca Wylie, writer and public technology advocate