As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to revolutionize the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs have launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.

The initiative, Our Feeds are Freeaims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and use it to create an open social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any one person or company, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that will fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build an independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky end up in the hands of billionaires.

The campaign comes a week after the Meta announced that it has scaled back fact-checking and removing rules to moderate its content. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, making it difficult for activist shareholders to oust him or drive changes. It also comes as Bluesky has seen a recent influx of users who migrated from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and other political causes, including right-wing AfD party in Germany.

Our Free Feeds launched with the support of many famous names, including actor Mark Ruffallo, director Alex Winter, writer Cory Doctorow, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, and others.

Robin Berjon, an independent technologist and one of the nine “custodians” of the project, told TechCrunch that Free Our Feeds is the result of conversations that he and other founding members have had exploring ways to drive change in through social media and digital infrastructure. works.

“If you think about our road network, if all the roads are owned by one or two billionaires, and they can tax anything, decide who is allowed to go where, etc., then we have a problem,” said Berjon. “And the digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously as big and in your face as a road maybe, but it works the same way. It has the exact same dynamic, the same concentration of power. And basically, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which is by its very nature, a public good, is managed in the public interest.

Although the team recognizes that it shares the same values ​​as Bluesky, they believe that the company is vulnerable to capital pressures, and that if it ends up under the control of a billionaire, users deserve alternative supported options. of independent infrastructure. The team contacted Bluesky, who announced that the decentralized network supports their mission to make the AT protocol billionaire-proof.

Free Our Feeds wants to raise $30 million over three years, and has an immediate goal of $4 million to hire a small team and build independent infrastructure.

“The goal of operating the infrastructure is to ensure that the AT protocol underlying Bluesky can remain open,” said Berjon. “They’ve opened it up, it’s available to people. But because there’s only one big entity, that’s Bluesky, there’s no countervailing power, nobody else can make sure it stays open. We want to operate an independent infrastructure from Bluesky that is compatible with them, that supports the entire network, so that they not only have a big place there. The idea is to continue to raise money to become a reliable that actor in that space, and use that money to fund other applications.

Berjon says that the AT Protocol is currently mostly used to build BlueSky, but it can also be used to build other types of social apps.

“Using the same infrastructure, you can create an Instagram analog, a Facebook analog, a Tiktok analog, or, you know, things that haven’t been invented yet,” he said. “And that’s exactly the goal. It’s not just copying things. And to invent these new things, you don’t have to reinvent user accounts or storage systems, etc. People can use their existing accounts on your new thing, because it is interoperable with the AT protocol. And so we really want to help people build these new applications.

Free Our Feeds aims to establish and operate an independent foundation by the end of the year. Berjon says if the non-profit doesn’t raise enough funds, it will return the money.