A consortium of open tech leaders is calling for social media feeds to be unbound from the control of tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
The group of tech entrepreneurs, scholars, and advocates, which includes celebrity signatories such as Mark Ruffalo and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, launched a fundraising campaign today called Free Our Feeds.
“The underlying problem [is] that one person can make such decisions for us. It puts us at the mercy of their decisions.”
Philippe Beaudoin
Numeno.ai
The campaign hopes to establish a public service foundation to protect decentralized social networking platform Bluesky’s underlying technology from billionaire capture.
Canadians Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, and Philippe Beaudoin, co-founder and CEO of Numeno.ai (formerly Waverly), are both custodians of the Free Our Feeds initiative. Nine custodians plan to help kickstart the foundation and register it as a non-profit in the US.
“Social media is the space for public discourse and should be controlled by our democratic processes, not the autocratic whims of billionaires,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, project custodian and executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, told BetaKit. “That should be a public good and shouldn’t be owned or controlled. There’s something fundamentally problematic about that.”
The campaign aims to raise a total of $30 million USD to build independently hosted tech infrastructure to ensure that Bluesky’s content stream and data remain accessible to users, developers, and researchers.
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By December 2025, the team plans to launch an innovation fund for developers who want to build alternative social media on top of Bluesky’s open protocols. According to the campaign, the goal is for users to take control of their feeds and “make social media a healthier and happier place.”
Free Our Feeds will initially operate under Development Gateway, a US-based charitable organization that will hold the funds raised through crowdfunding. The executive team and custodians will have authority over governance decisions, including how the money will be spent. According to the campaign, Bluesky supports the project’s objective but does not provide operational or financial backing.
Billionaire broligarchy
The team behind Free Our Feeds is concerned that Bluesky could be vulnerable to the whims of the world’s largest tech companies and the billionaires who lead them.
Microblogging social media platform Bluesky opened registrations to the public in February 2024. It was conceived as a research venture at Twitter under the direction of then-CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019. Bluesky was then spun off into an independent company in 2021.
“Social media is the space for public discourse and it should be controlled by our democratic processes.”
Sherif Elsayed-Ali
Future of Technology Institute
Bluesky is built upon an open, decentralized social network known as the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol allows servers to communicate with each other, allowing users to own and retain their own data and profile information while switching between providers or social platforms.
The benefit corporation that owns Bluesky has raised over $23 million USD from VCs such as Blockchain Capital, Alumni Ventures, and San Francisco-based Neo.
The Free Our Feeds project claims that Bluesky and its underlying infrastructure are therefore susceptible to billionaire capture, and could end up under the direct control of and direction of high-net-worth leaders, such as Elon Musk with X and Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These two individuals, who are two of the world’s richest men, determine the platform rules for a global user base of over 3 billion people.
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“Social media today is controlled by giant platforms built to be addictive, rewarding divisive content, hate speech and disinformation. These platforms drive us apart rather than bring us closer,” the Free Our Feeds pitch deck reads.
Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the extent of his unilateral control over billions of social media users last week when he announced changes to Meta’s content moderation policy. The changes included eliminating its fact-checking teams, removing automated filters that flag certain types of harmful posts, and promoting more political content after the platform began suppressing it in March 2024.
Zuckerberg framed the overhaul as a move toward “free expression,” which he said had been declining on Meta platforms. In his announcement, he blamed legacy media for pushing to increase content moderation after Donald Trump’s election as US president in 2016—though Zuckerberg himself decided to create a Meta oversight board and launch the fact-checking program. He also blamed his own fact-checkers for being “too politically biased” and contributing to increased censorship on Meta’s platforms, though their role was mostly to flag harmful or suspicious content rather than remove it.
The move has been seen as a response to threats from incoming US president Donald Trump, who has accused Zuckerberg’s platforms of anti-conservative bias through its content moderation.
David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, wrote in a Substack post that Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is a matter of political convenience. “Why would Mark Zuckerberg pay extra money for a program that creates political hassles?” Karpf wrote.
Zuckerberg is taking inspiration from Elon Musk’s X in replacing fact-checkers with a “community notes”-style model. Also a self-described free speech proponent, Musk implemented changes on X that downranked or censored trustworthy sources of information and boosted misinformation while more vocally and financially aligning himself with Trump.
While Zuckerberg’s changes to Meta’s operations align with the wishes of the incoming US administration, it will have immediate and potentially harmful trickle-down effects for billions of users. New content moderation guidelines reduce the amount of content that can be flagged for removal, now allowing posts to stay up that insult others based on their sexual or gender identity, denigrate immigrants or refugees, and refer to women as “household objects.” Facebook employees themselves are being censored internally for speaking out against the new policies, according to reports from 404 Media and Platformer.
Beaudoin worries that this is just one example of how billionaires can make politically motivated, unilateral decisions that directly impact the feed experience for users.
“I really hope we can use this moment to talk about, not only that decision about fact-checking, but the underlying problem that one person can make such decisions for us,” Beaudoin said. “It puts us at the mercy of their decisions.”
User agency
Following the establishment of its foundation, Free Our Feeds establishes plans to put part of its crowdfunded money toward an innovation fund. By the end of 2026, the campaign hopes to dole out $16.2 million USD of seed funding to teams and projects to create new social platforms and features on top of Bluesky’s underlying tech.
The goal is to expand options for social media users. According to Beaudoin, the largest social platforms lock consumers in and discourage them from exploring other options. Leaving X or Meta platforms means losing your data and connections.
“If there was a plurality of options, we could go elsewhere,” Beaudoin said. “But right now, it’s impossible because the underlying system locks us in a few different places, it makes it really hard.”
But the AT Protocol allows for account portability, so users can take ownership of records such as posts, comments, likes, and follows, and move them to different platforms.
Beaudoin, who co-founded Montréal’s Element AI and was a founding engineer on Google’s Chrome machine learning team, has been tackling the problem of social media agency for years.
In 2022, after two years of engineering, Beaudoin launched Montréal-based Waverly, a social media app built on top of the AT Protocol that allows users to personalize their feeds through an AI-powered natural language analysis algorithm—in short, by users telling the app what content they want to see.
In August 2024, Beaudoin pivoted the venture to bring that technology to the B2B space through Numeno.ai. Its application programming interfaces (APIs) allow companies to offer customers and users custom experiences based on natural queries.
Beaudoin is hoping that this kind of user-personalized experience could be a part of the future of social media if the Free Our Feeds campaign is successful and raises the money to build more democratic networks.
“If you think about it, we have seen very little innovation in the way our feeds work since the beginning of social media,” Beaudoin said. “The dream here is … the richness of the early internet, when a bunch of people were trying different things.”
Feature image by Madison McLauchlan. AT logo courtesy Bluesky.