The social network Bluesky has, for some 27 million users, become a viable replacement for Elon Musk’s X. According to a report last week about a new funding round, the public benefit corporation may soon be valued at $700 million.
However, many Bluesky users are nervous about its future, given its venture-capital backing, and seeing how billionaires such as Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have demonstrated their ability to reshape their platforms with impunity.
So an unusual coalition has assembled to billionaire-proof Bluesky’s underlying technology, to ensure that — even if Bluesky itself were to end up under an oligarch’s control — users would be able to easily jump ship and take their connections and data with them to other social networks. Part of the project involves stimulating the creation of those other networks, which could move past Twitter-clone territory to take on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
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The campaign aims to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of $4 million. The money would be used to establish a public-interest foundation that would govern the evolution of the AT Protocol, fund developers who want to build platforms that can run on the protocol, and gradually build out infrastructure that those platforms could use.
“It is an unusual thing in the sense that infrastructure, and technical infrastructure particularly, is possibly the least glamorous thing you could be talking to people about — and as a consequence famously impossible to raise funds for,” said technologist Robin Berjon, one of the “custodians” of the project. “At the same time, we have these luminaries and famous people who are really excited about it. Bringing the two together is quite novel. I’m very excited to see it pan out.”
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In terms of building out new AT Protocol infrastructure, Free Our Feeds will first focus on a second relay — the mechanism that lets the network know when a user posts something, thus enabling things like feeds and view counts. At the moment, Bluesky controls the only AT Protocol relay. “Because that’s a point of concentrated power, that’s a high priority for us,” said Berjon.
If it raises sufficient funding, the project would then move on to tasks such as operating users’ data repositories, known as “personal data servers” in the AT Protocol.
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Berjon, a former vice-president of data governance at the New York Times, also said there may be scope for “building bridges” between parts of the AT Protocol and the ActivityPub protocol that is used by Mastodon and Meta’s Threads — even if the two rival protocols never quite merge.
Ultimately, the aim is to make it easy for developers to set up alternatives to legacy social networks, and perhaps even new kinds of social networks.
I have little faith in wealthy liberal celebrities like Ruffalo and wealthy libertarian techbros like Wales saving us from a system that they are a part of and profit from.