Vision

Our goal

Free Our Feeds is a campaign to focus attention and resources on the opportunity to build information technologies that serve the interests of people over companies.

Today, a handful of billionaires control the social media platforms that dominate our communications and information spaces. 

Bluesky's growth is an opportunity to shake up this status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.

But Bluesky is just the beginning. It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. 

Our goal is to contribute to an ecosystem of interconnected apps, companies and initiatives that prioritize people’s interests. We are focusing on the AT Protocol because it enables a kind of data commons: apps can share infrastructure, while users can change applications and keep their identities, their social networks and their data. 

We are also interested in any protocol or information infrastructure that encourages healthy competition and more choice and control for users in information and communications systems.

Our roadmap

We aim to catalyze financial, technical, policy, and cultural resources, and raise funds to create and support initiatives, projects and organizations.

This approach will support a robust and diverse community of technologists and creators to build a new generation of internet infrastructure and applications that can't be captured by surveillance-based, extractive business models. The goal here is larger than the success of any one platform or application.

To that end, we are concentrating on three key support functions:

  • Incubating an ATProto technology and financial ecosystem by developing a range of funding instruments

  • Supporting the advancement of technical specifications, governance, and standards of ATProto, as well as related policies

  • Advocating for and supporting cultural and civic participation to help drive demand for technologies built on ATProto and other open social applications

To support those functions, we propose to develop an independent organization based in Europe to house and incubate technology development and services, knowledge governance and policy work, and to support social participation. We also aim to support partners and aligned initiatives around the world. And, we are looking to build investment vehicles, such as venture studios and funds, grants mechanisms, public/private partnerships, and other financial support approaches appropriate for infrastructure and ecosystem investment.

Our fundraising targets

With our initial crowdfunding campaign, we hope to raise $500,000 to support research, planning, community building and convening, and early investments in tools and infrastructure.

$1 million will allow us to complete foundational research, set up a legal entity and launch initial initiatives for commons-based tools and infrastructure, and $4 million is our target to build out and complete those initial initiatives, and set up and run our initial incubation, investment and funding proposals.

Our longer term goal of $30 million will allow us to substantially seed and sustain the supporting institutions for this open social infrastructure. Notably, as the number of users grow, as applications mature, and as financial mechanisms assert themselves, we hope to see considerably more invested in the space.

How open social protocols serve a healthy information ecology

Open social technologies are a building block for information systems that serve people's need for knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Open social protocols can help create opportunities for people to control their relationships to information, and to build communities and conversations that serve their interests. These technologies are aligned with a vision of the internet that can be described as 'connection without permission'. This powerful democratizing force provides the means for anyone to participate in the creation of technology, and in which everyone can both create and circulate information.

However, it is important to note that technology that supports more user control is a necessary, but not sufficient component of healthy information and communications spaces. Open social can be infrastructure that serves public information and communications. It can make space for information integrity: to help people to understand where, why, how, and by whom information is created. But it also must be responsive to the needs and interests of people, and to offer materially better services. 

Beyond that, how internet technologies are designed and funded in practice has a significant effect on the actual use and participation patterns. For the internet to be a democratizing force, there needs to be intentional design, considering the interests of a diversity of human experience, accommodating differences in language, citizenship, access to resources, and other markers of social and economic heterogeneity. There also needs to be incentives for ethical business practices, to serve these values in in the real world.

Internet infrastructure will be shaped not just by technology choices, but by financial incentives and opportunities, regulatory frameworks and ideologies, and political, cultural and social interests. We need to explore the interaction of information infrastructure with civic and public information, media in all its forms, and journalism and other creators of information and knowledge. 

Considering how these layers are designed, funded and sustained is fundamental to realizing a vision of a healthy information ecology that actually does the work of helping people everywhere with access to information and knowledge, provide spaces for private communications, and participate in public and civic discussions.