The new organization wants to build on the open-source, user-defined model of the increasingly popular platform Bluesky, in case it, too, comes under the control of a billionaire owner.

Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.

Many businesses that use social media are adopting a wait-and-see approach regarding the new social media kid on the block, BlueSky.

Free Our Feeds, which includes support from the Mozilla Foundation, is working with Bluesky to make sure the open source social media landscape is robust — even if it means more competition for Bluesky itself.

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.

Bluesky surpassed Truth Social’s monthly users. That’s a major win for one app, and a death knell for the other.

The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single company or billionaires,

The likes of Mark Ruffalo and Jimmy Wales are backing the Free Our Feeds project, to ensure Bluesky's tech will thrive even if the company goes bad.