
A consortium of philanthropists, tech moguls and celebrities have launched a new organization that seeks to liberate the foundational technology that powers the social media website Bluesky from that company itself.
The organization, called Free Our Feeds, is backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla executives Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman, Hollywood actor and director Alex Winter, actor Mark Ruffalo and journalist Cory Doctorow, among others. The founders say they want to liberate the AT Protocol, the platform that Bluesky is built upon, to ensure it remains open and accessible as Bluesky becomes more corporate.
As described, Free Our Feeds envisions the AT Protocol in a similar nature to ActivityPub, the open source technology that powers the social platform Mastodon. Over the past two months, Bluesky has experienced staggering growth as users disenfranchised with X (formerly Twitter) under tech mogul Elon Musk’s ownership seek out a similar platform with similar features.
Bluesky itself has launched a number of innovative features that helped accelerate its growth, including Starter Packs, which allowed users to group like-minded accounts into a central repository that new and existing Bluesky users could quickly follow en masse.
But Bluesky has also experienced growing pains, beyond the occasional outage or glitch that plagues most social media startups in their infancy. Allegations have swirled that Bluesky does not apply its user conduct consistently, and while its moderation tools have given users greater leverage to block out abusive and harassing behavior, some critics note that those tools have allowed Bluesky users to create their own large-scale echo chambers that ultimately stifle the free speech and expression of other users — contrary to what Bluesky, as an organization, claims to embrace.
Presently, Bluesky Social is the main way most new users sign up for an account. Those accounts are governed by an acceptable conduct policy that is haphazardly applied and somewhat vague. The consequences of violating that policy can be dire: You can lose your account. When that happens, it isn’t entirely clear how Bluesky users can export their data and move it over to another platform (or even a self-hosted one) that uses the AT Protocol.
In this respect, Bluesky is the biggest guardian of the AT Protocol — which is the precise opposite of what was supposed to happen. Free Our Feeds presents itself as the solution to that problem.
“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,” Robin Berjon, a technologist participating in the Free Our Feeds campaign, told the website TechCrunch. “And digital infrastructure is not, as you know, obviously big and in your face as a road maybe, but it works in exactly the same way. It has the exact same dynamic, the exact same concentration of power. And so essentially, what we’re doing is making sure that this digital infrastructure, which is by its nature, a public good, is governed in the public interest.”
On paper, Free Our Feeds and Bluesky appear to embrace the same core values — an open, liberated technology platform that is foundational to the free exchange of speech and information, while also empowering people with certain levels of control that they don’t typically find on larger, more-commercial platforms like X (Twitter) and Facebook.
Where things differ is the approach. Free Our Feeds is a consortium; Bluesky is a company that is venture-backed. The founders and participants in Free Our Feeds want to ensure that, as Bluesky as a company grows up, the AT Protocol doesn’t fall susceptible to the pressures of the corporate world that have belied similarly-positioned social media platforms in years past.
“Because there’s only one big entity, that’s Bluesky, there’s no countervailing power, there’s no one else to make sure it stays open,” Berjon explained. “We intend to operate independent infrastructure from Bluesky that’s compatible with them, that supports the entire network, so that it’s not only them having a major place there. The idea really is to continue raising money to become a credible actor in that space, and to use that money to essentially fund other applications.”