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.

  • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Funny, Mastodon just posted a similar thing about creating a foundation. But the problem is, the existence of a foundation does nothing to prevent billionaires from controlling social media. For billionaires its very easy to donate a few hundred thousand USD to the foundation and gain influence that way. I expect that Bluesky will be fine for the first years (maybe like early Twitter), but sooner or later the foundation will take decisions that the users dont like, and there is nothing they can do about it.

    In my view, the only way to avoid influence from billionaires is to avoid any large centralized structures. In the Fediverse there are dozens of platforms and thousands of instances. Even if a billionaire were to take control over a couple of projects or large instances, people would create forks in a matter of days. Some admins would block these corrupted instances, and their users would barely notice that anything changed.

    So Bluesky is just trying to repeat something that has already failed. The Fediverse is the future, but it will take a long time for most people to understand that.