The social network Bluesky has, for some 27 million users, become a viable replacement for Elon Musk’s X. According to a report last week about a new funding round, the public benefit corporation may soon be valued at $700 million.
However, many Bluesky users are nervous about its future, given its venture-capital backing, and seeing how billionaires such as Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have demonstrated their ability to reshape their platforms with impunity.
So an unusual coalition has assembled to billionaire-proof Bluesky’s underlying technology, to ensure that—even if Bluesky itself were to end up under an oligarch’s control—users would be able to easily jump ship and take their connections and data with them to other social networks. Part of the project involves stimulating the creation of those other networks, which could move past Twitter-clone territory to take on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
The Free Our Feeds campaign includes Hollywood actors like Marvel mainstay Mark Ruffalo and Bill & Ted star Alex Winter, as well as tech luminaries like Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation executive director Nabiha Syed, and Facebook investor turned foe Roger McNamee.
Bluesky is supposed to be a decentralized social network, unlike centralized services such as X or Facebook. It runs on something called the AT (“authenticated transfer”) protocol, which in theory makes it possible for Bluesky to be merely part of a wider network of platforms between which users can interact and move their activities.
In practice, though, Bluesky is the only sizable social network to use the AT protocol, of which it is the creator and chief steward. (Minor implementations include as recipe-exchange and blogging platforms.) This is where Free Our Feeds comes in.
Rebuilding social media
The campaign aims to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of $4 million. The money would be used to establish a public interest foundation that would govern the evolution of the AT Protocol, fund developers who want to build platforms that can run on the protocol, and gradually build out infrastructure that those platforms could use.
“It is an unusual thing in the sense that infrastructure, and technical infrastructure particularly, is possibly the least glamorous thing you could be talking to people about — and as a consequence famously impossible to raise funds for,” said technologist Robin Berjon, one of the “custodians” of the project. “At the same time, we have these luminaries and famous people who are really excited about it. Bringing the two together is quite novel. I’m very excited to see it pan out.”
Bluesky has nothing to do with this initiative, but it has long had a mantra that “the company is a future adversary”—meaning its technological decisions must protect against the possibility of malevolent future management, by allowing users to flee without losing all their content and relationships.
“With Bluesky, we’re building an open network, and new organizations and partners building on the AT Protocol means that end users will have more choice and an improved experience,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told Coins2Day. “We’re excited to work alongside organizations like Project Free Our Feeds to increase adoption of the AT Protocol and open networks.”
Berjon said the AT Protocol was “designed well for a new world in which multiple people can provide social media services, in which you can have a variety of feeds instead of just the one feed decided by just one billionaire, and in which you can build alternative approaches, in which different people can be providing the infrastructure so that those who own the infrastructure don’t capture the entire network automatically.”
In terms of building out new AT protocol infrastructure, Free Our Feeds will first focus on a second relay—the mechanism that lets the network know when a user posts something, thus enabling things like feeds and view counts. At the moment, Bluesky controls the only AT Protocol relay. “Because that’s a point of concentrated power, that’s a high priority for us,” said Berjon.
If it raises sufficient funding, the project would then move on to tasks such as operating users’ data repositories, known as “personal data servers” in the AT protocol.
“Excessive concentration of power”
Meanwhile, the project’s still unnamed new foundation will insert itself into the development of the protocol, in an attempt to “have open and much more democratic governance,” said Berjon, who also insisted that “we’re not taking over.”
The AT protocol still hasn’t been formally standardized, so it’s a good time to figure out “how multiple operators of infrastructure work together to make sure that the entire network operates smoothly and to make sure that we don’t have an excessive concentration of power there,” he added.
Berjon, a former vice president of data governance at the New York Times, also said there may be scope for “building bridges” between parts of the AT protocol and the ActivityPub protocol that is used by Mastodon and Meta’s Threads—even if the two rival protocols never quite merge.
Ultimately, the aim is to make it easy for developers to set up alternatives to legacy social networks, and perhaps even new kinds of social networks.
“Once you have the infrastructure operating and you have the ability to reuse building blocks instead of having to bring over users for everything, in a single day’s coding you can set up a basic social network,” said Berjon. “And then the sky’s the limit.”