The push to ‘billionaire-proof’ social media

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The push to ‘billionaire-proof’ social media.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and turned it into X, the biggest beneficiary of the ensuing exodus of mostly left-leaning users has been Meta. Its rival offering, Threads, has attracted some 300 million users, far outpacing alternatives such as Bluesky and Mastodon.

But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since followed Musk in embracing President-elect Donald Trump — albeit not to the same degree — and last week, the company announced an X-like pullback from fact-checking while loosening its rules on hate speech. Meanwhile, Chinese-owned TikTok could soon be banned in the United States, further consolidating power over social media in the hands of a few Silicon Valley giants.

Now advocates of Bluesky and Mastodon are moving to fortify the technology behind those platforms against the possibility of centralized control.

On Monday, a group of technologists and celebrity funders announced plans for a public interest foundation with a goal to kick-start the development of new social media apps built on the same technology that powers Bluesky. The campaign, called Free Our Feeds, envisions an “entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart” — giving users the ability to move freely between the apps, which could include alternatives to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or even Bluesky itself.

The group’s backers include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, actors Mark Ruffalo and Alex Winter, musician Brian Eno, and authors Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. It launched a GoFundMe campaign with the goal of raising 4millionandsaiditaimstoeventuallyraise4 million and said it aims to eventually raise 4millionandsaiditaimstoeventuallyraise30 million.

The challenge: The group is up against social media giants with annual revenue in the billions — or hundreds of billions, in Meta’s case.

The project is independent of Bluesky, but it hopes to deliver on that social network’s founding goals.

Bluesky was conceived in 2019by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as a “decentralized” form of social media that no single entity could control — a response to pressure Dorsey was feeling at the time from Twitter’s corporate board, which was demanding more profits, and from politicians of both parties seeking to steer its speech policies. Dorsey is no longer involved, and the Bluesky team led by CEO Jay Graber has so far prioritized the success of the Bluesky app over the broader project of a decentralized network.

Bluesky is built on a software system known as a “protocol” that is designed to allow other people to build apps that can plug into it — much the way different browsers can access the same websites, or different email providers tap into the same messaging systems. But Bluesky itself is the only app of note using its protocol so far. The idea behind Free Our Feeds is to turn the concept of a decentralized network into reality by spurring the creation of other choices, letting users transfer their data, posts and followers between different apps.

Bluesky leaders expressed support for the project Monday.

“We’re excited about their efforts, because to make the Bluesky network truly billionaire-proof, there must be viable alternatives available to users, and they’re helping to make that a reality,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu told the Tech Brief via email.

In separate news Monday, rival network Mastodon announced its own plans to hedge against centralized control of its platform.

The Germany-based company said in a blog post Monday that it will form a nonprofit to take ownership of key assets, including the Mastodon name and copyright — “affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.” Until now, it has been run by founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, who will soon “hand off the overall Mastodon management” and focus instead on product strategy, “where his original passion lies.”

Like Bluesky, Mastodon is built on a software protocol that other apps can also use, allowing users to move between them. But the two run on different protocols — the result of Bluesky’s choice early on to build its own system because of perceived limitations with the oneMastodon uses. Ironically, that means the two social networks vying to build a future where social networks all work together do not work with each other.

Meta’s Threads has offered some features that allow it to work with Mastodon’s system, but not with Bluesky’s.

Mastodon’s Rochko told the Tech Brief on Monday that he was not consulted by the Free Our Feeds group and was not thrilled by its announcement.

“Personally, I think it’s a wasted opportunity to organize this huge effort with a $30 million fundraising goal just to rebuild … what already exists and flourishes today on ActivityPub,” the protocol that underlies Mastodon, Rochko said. He argued that Bluesky’s protocol, called AT Protocol, is designed in a way that gives Bluesky too much control over the system as a whole, meaning that “it will always be an uphill battle” to make it truly open.

Eli Pariser, co-director of the nonprofit New Public and a custodian of the Free Our Feeds project, said he’s supportive of both endeavors, adding that the decision to go with Bluesky’s protocol was pragmatic. “Here’s something that is actually working for people at scale, that is also built on these ideas about user community and control,” he said.

Bluesky has signed up more than 27 million users at last count, while Mastodon reported in November that it had passed 9 million. Both remain much smaller than Threads and X, which have hundreds of millions of users.

Still, some advocates of independent social media hailed both announcements as a sign of progress.

“This is a monumental day for the future of the social web, though it might not be obvious for a while,” technologist Anil Dash said in posts on both Bluesky and Mastodon on Monday. “These two moves together put the most credible players on solid ground for years to come — and set up the open platforms to enable lots of innovation just when it’s needed most.”

Pariser said the moves are timely given the recent changes at tech giants spurred by Trump’s election.

“Anytime you have singular centralized control, you’ll have [tech leaders] swinging around in the wind based on what they think is best for them at that moment,” he said. “Our social media systems shouldn’t be dependent on that.”

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Before you log off

The Australian Open don’t own all of their broadcasting rights (fairly common), so they’re live-streaming a Wii Tennis-like version of the matches on YouTube - love this 😂

This is Carlos Alcaraz’ match point: pic.twitter.com/HvxhYneWGH

— Bastien Fachan (@BastienFachan) January 13, 2025

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