Free Our Feeds Wants to Make Social Media Billionaire-Proof
A new $30 million campaign aims to ensure no single wealthy individual can control how we connect online.
Remember when social media was supposed to be about connecting people rather than enriching billionaires? A new initiative called Free Our Feeds wants to make that vision a reality.
On Monday, a coalition of tech advocates and public interest groups announced an ambitious $30 million plan to ensure social media platforms can't be hijacked by billionaires' whims. The timing couldn't be more relevant—just last week, Mark Zuckerberg unilaterally decided to gut Meta's fact-checking program, blindsiding the organizations involved and making what appears to be a transparent overture to President-elect Trump.
Free Our Feeds isn't just trying to create yet another social media alternative. They're attempting something far more fundamental—they want to make the underlying technology of the Bluesky platform (called the AT Protocol) "billionaire-proof" by putting it in the hands of a nonprofit foundation.
"The last two decades have seen the world sleepwalk into a situation where a handful of companies dictate our entire social media experience," Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Executive Director of the Future of Technology Institute, said. “Now, for the first time we have an opportunity to rewrite the rules."
Here's why this matters: Right now, even if you hate what Elon Musk has done to X or what Zuckerberg is doing with Meta's platforms, your options are limited. Sure, you can switch to Bluesky (which has grown to 25 million users since October), but what happens if some billionaire decides to buy that too? We've seen this movie before.
Free Our Feeds wants to make sure that can't happen again. Their plan includes building independent infrastructure so that users would have somewhere else to go even if Bluesky itself got bought out. Think of it like this: instead of having one company controlling everything, you'd have an ecosystem of different apps all speaking the same language (the AT Protocol), making it harder for any single billionaire to take control.
Robin Berjon, one of the project's custodians, explained it to TechCrunch using a clever analogy: "If you think of our road network, if all the roads were owned by one or two billionaires, and they could tax anything, decide who's allowed to go where, etc., then we would be in trouble." That's effectively what we have now with social media—a few wealthy individuals controlling our digital public squares.
The initiative has already gathered impressive support, including Mozilla Foundation leadership, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, actor Mark Ruffalo, and surveillance capitalism critic Shoshana Zuboff. But more importantly, they're working directly with Bluesky to make this happen. This isn't some hostile takeover—it's a collaborative effort to ensure the future of social media serves users rather than billionaires.
Is $30 million enough to transform social media? Maybe not on its own. But it's a start, and it's a concrete plan rather than just complaining about the status quo. The immediate goal is to raise $4 million to establish the foundation and get critical infrastructure running.
What's particularly interesting is their commitment to transparency—they've promised to return donations if they don't hit their fundraising targets. That's a refreshing change from the typical Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" approach.
Look, I get it. We've all grown cynical about promises to "fix" social media. But this could be different. It's not about creating a utopian new platform; it's about building the infrastructure to ensure that no matter what platform you choose to use, it can't be captured by billionaire interests.
The alternative is continuing down our current path, where billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg can unilaterally make decisions that affect global discourse. Just look at Meta's fact-checking announcement—a decision that will have massive ramifications for information integrity, made by one man with essentially zero accountability.
We have a chance to do something different. Free Our Feeds might not be perfect, but it's a serious attempt to address the fundamental power imbalance in how our social media platforms are controlled.
If you want to learn more or contribute to the campaign, you should visit its website. The future of social media doesn't have to belong to billionaires.
I know Mastodon is not as shiny as bluesky for a lot of folk, but it's currently in the process of doing something similar. The underlying protocol is already open source and supported by the The World Wide Web Consortium (https://w3.org/) which is also a non profit.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/
The fundamental problem I see is that Blue Sky is another monolithic social media platform. You are visualizing everybody on Facebook moving to it. Everybody? Including the bullies that never left Facebook and that, even at its height, Facebook could not eliminate?
Facebook's underlying problem was that it was impossible to intercept all the racist/misogynist posts and shut down all the bullies. As Bluesky grows, it will also reach that level. Mastodon is a federation of numerous separate, mainly small social media nodes, each run by a different person or group. To be part of the federation, they must meet specific standards that do not allow hate speech or advertising.
It has long been a safe place for members of minorities such as LBGTQIA+ people, who are often targets of hate speech. That will not change. Billionaires will not be interested in part because of its basic structure and because it is not designed to make money.
I wish Bluesky and Free Our Feeds all the best. It is a well-meaning attempt. But when it becomes another Facevook, remember that Mastodon will still be here.