Between Mark Zuckerberg’s dissolution of Meta’s fact-checking program and Elon Musk loosening hate speech and disinformation moderation on X — and making an obvious Nazi salute after President Trump’s inauguration earlier this week — the dystopian state of a lot of the mainstream social media panorama is driving customers to hunt different choices or go offline altogether.
Amid this widespread disillusion with billionaire-controlled social networks, a gaggle of tech entrepreneurs has launched a marketing campaign to determine a brand new ecosystem that may’t be managed by any singular individual or firm and places energy — and information possession — again into the palms of customers.
The Free Our Feeds initiative goals to construct off of Bluesky’s core know-how, the Authenticated Switch (AT) protocol, a brand new shared language that laptop servers use to speak with one another. Utilizing this know-how — which continues to be backed by Bluesky, a personal firm — the marketing campaign hopes to create a decentralized social media community freed from oligarchical oversight. That’s additionally one thing Bluesky’s Chief Govt Officer Jay Graber mentioned she helps.
The Free our Feeds marketing campaign is grounded in constructing off of Bluesky’s underlying know-how, the AT protocol. (picture courtesy Free Our Feeds)
Josh Kramer, head of Editorial on the nonprofit analysis and improvement lab New_Public, instructed Hyperallergic that Bluesky’s underlying know-how presents a brand new alternative to construct a brand new social media panorama “unlike we’ve ever seen before.”
“ [Free Our Feeds] is trying to take Bluesky’s essential infrastructure and make it so that that it becomes a separate thing that is un-tamperable and un-ownable,” Kramer defined.
New_Public is led by co-directors Deepti Doshi and Eli Pariser, who’re additionally two of the 9 technical advisors, also referred to as “custodians,” spearheading the Free Our Feeds marketing campaign. Over the subsequent three years, they search to fundraise $30 million to develop this new social media community, which might be overseen by a public-interest basis in an effort to make sure that the AT protocol would stay open.
They intend to determine the muse by the top of this yr, after fundraising an preliminary objective of $4 million. To date, they’ve raised practically $74,000 from about 1,400 donors and in addition acquired dozens of signatory supporters from figures together with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and musician and visible artist Brian Eno. (Hyperallergic tried to contact Eno for remark.)
Whereas acknowledging that the Free Our Feeds initiative shouldn’t be a totally foolproof plan, Kramer maintained that it might be “a significant step forward and worthwhile experiment that possibly could be leveraged to create like a whole new way of doing things.”
“There are hundreds of millions of Americans who are enthusiastic users of TikTok and facing a possible ban,” Kramer mentioned, referencing the app’s nonetheless unsure future beneath a 2024 congressional ban that referred to as for father or mother firm ByteDance to promote the app or in any other case see it shut down. After a short outage over the weekend, President Donald Trump issued an government order briefly stalling the ban for 75 days as a way to discover a decision that protects nationwide safety. Within the weeks prior, nevertheless, swarms of TikTok customers had flocked to a Chinese language app referred to as RedNote, driving up downloads as self-labeled US “TikTok refugees.”
TikTok’s future however, Kramer opined that many customers are “so eager to not continue the status quo of Silicon Valley and big tech social media that they’re doing anything they possibly can to avoid it.”