Free Our Feeds
freeourfeeds.com
Let's take social media away from billionaire capture.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24751597

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24748390

screenshot of bluesky post with text: It’s time to reclaim social media. Billionaires & venture capital shouldn’t control our digital lives. #FreeOurFeeds is raising $4M to build a public-interest alternative. Chip in today to make it happen. January 13, 2025 at 2:04 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it’s a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

…

Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

  • BlisterexeEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    they didn’t do it that way for no reason though, and they did do some stuff to alleviate the problems it causes.

    • it allows for better discoverability, no missing comments in threads, good global search, ect. Basically solves most all of the papercuts the fediverse has.
    • there isn’t a “server” you host, per se. There are 3 components, the appview (ui, self-explanatory) and decides how your algorithm is, the relay (hard to run, does the federation and outputs everything it sees as a “firehose”) and the pds (personal data server), which hosts account data and is the “home” for your account. I host my own pds, and you can migrate your account between pds’s. The only hard part to run is the relay.

    also everything bluesky is open source

    • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
      51·
      1 day ago

      The thing is, the discoverability issue on the fediverse disappears if we stop treating it like it’s a centealized space. Everything looks the same, and everything uses the visual language of centralized social media. And we encourage people to “join Mastodon” or “join Lemmy”, which is like saying “join WordPress” and “join Joomla”.

      We need to be promoting specific websites that people can join, for the reason of wanting to communicate with people on those websites. We need to treat federation as a value-add, not the whole damn value proposition.

      Until we do, we’re just going to be navel gazing.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      The only hard part to run is the relay.

      So what prevents the relay from being bought by a billionaire, who would then decide on the content of the output?

      • BlisterexeEnglish
        31·
        1 day ago

        you can just run another one, currently nobody does but if the main relay gets bought out, the community can band together to run one, it’s a couple hundred bucks a month, expensive, but not unsustainable.