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.

  • @EldritchEnglish
    5•1 day ago

    Theoretically, not really. Realistically, no not at all. My understanding, being corporately backed. They want every server to host everything. So that they theoretically have access to everything to datamine and advertise on. In the fediverse. You can see and interact with all the content. But your server doesn’t aggregate it unless you interact. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

    Basically what this means, is that you could spin up and host your mastodon or Lemmy server on an SBC laying in a drawer spare. Somewhat like Action Retro did with bitbang.social. If you want to run a bsky server. Theoretically you can. You will just need quite a lot of storage, bandwidth, and server hardware. Activity Pub is decentralized. The AT protocol technically can be decentralized in a way. But not really.

    • @[email protected]English
      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

      • @[email protected]English
        4•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)English
        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?

        • @[email protected]English
          2•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.

          • @[email protected]English
            5•1 day ago

            Decentralized in theory, but not in practice is just centralized.

            Also:

            So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage

            https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

            • Blaze (he/him)English
              2•23 hours ago

              No, instances can be run by enthusiasts and keep operating based on donations

              https://feddit.org/post/2600584

              The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

              https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/