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A new campaign aims to safeguard social media from billionaires using Bluesky’s underlying tech


The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single company or billionaires, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, which make it hard for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky saw a recent surge in users who migrated over from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.

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