Between Mark Zuckerberg’s dissolution of Meta’s fact checking program and the relaxation of Elon Musk Hate -sowing statements and moderation of disinformation on X – and make an apparent Nazi Greetings after President Trump’s inauguration earlier this week-the dystopian state of a large part of the regular social media landscape drives users to do it Search for alternative options or go completely offline.
In the midst of this widespread disillusion, billionaires controlled social networks have launched a group of technology entrepreneurs a campaign to set up a new ecosystem that cannot be checked by a single person or company and that the power – and ownership of data – Lays in the hands of users again.
The Free our feeds The aim of the initiative is to build on Bluesky’s core technology, the Authenticated Transfer (AT) protocol, a new shared language that computer servers use to communicate with each other. With the help of this technology – which is still supported by Bluesky, a private company – the campaign hopes to create a decentralized social media network that is free from oligarchic supervision. That is also something bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber says said she supports.
Josh Kramer, head of editors in the non-profit research and development laboratory New_Public, said Hyperallergic That Bluesky’s underlying technology offers a new chance to build a new social media landscape “as we have never seen before.”
“”[Free Our Feeds]Trying to make Bluesky’s essential infrastructure so that it will be a separate thing that cannot be tampered with and that cannot be made owned, “Kramer explained.
New_Public is led by co-directors Deepti Doshi and Eli Pariser, who are also two of the nine technical advisers, also known as ‘Custodians’, who lead the Free Our Feeds campaign. Over the next three years they want to raise $ 30 million to develop this new social media network, which would be under the supervision of a public interest foundation in an attempt to ensure that The AT protocol would remain open.
They are planning to set up the foundation at the end of this year, after an initial objective of $ 4 million. So far they have done that elevated Almost $ 74,000 of around 1,400 donors and also received dozens of signatories from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and musician and visual artist Brian Eno. (Hyperallergic tried to contact Eno for comment.)
Although he acknowledged that the Free Our Feeds initiative is not a completely infallible plan, Kramer insisted that it could be an important step forward and a valuable experiment that could possibly be used to create a completely new way of working. “
“There are hundreds of millions of Americans who are enthusiastic users of Tiktok and who are confronted with a possible ban,” said Kramer, referring to the still uncertain future of the app under a 2024 conference ban, in which parent company Bytedance was called to the app to sell or close it otherwise. Down. After one Short interference last weekendPresident Donald Trump an executive order issued Temporarily suspend the prohibition for 75 days to find a solution that protects national security. In the weeks before Tiktok users had swarms flowed to a Chinese app called RednoteAs a result of which the number of downloads increased as self-proclaimed American ‘tap refugees’.
Despite the future of Tiktok, Kramer believed that many users “so much like the status quo of Silicon Valley and the great technical social media do not want to continue, that they do everything they can to avoid this.”
