US$ 30 million to reinvent the wheel
I have been thinking and reading quite a bit about Free Our Feeds, a campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture”.
Free Our Feeds consists of a group of experts willing to raise USD 30 million via donations, over a three-year period, to create a foundation and “[…] turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app.”
It’s a noble goal, but not very original. On Bluesky’s website, one of the first sentences on the cover says:
Social media is too important to be controlled by a few corporations. We’re building an open foundation for the social internet so that we can all shape its future.
***
The Free Our Feeds website is weird. There are no documents or anything that resembles something official. There are photos of some people, a manifesto, and a Q&A section with vague promises and superficial information.
Free Our Feeds doesn’t yet have an established legal entity. The funds raised will be held by a “fiscal sponsor,” Development Gateway, a non-profit org based in the United States. The goal is to raise at least USD 4 million in 2025 to set up the bureaucratic structure by the end of the year.
Signatories of Free Our Feeds lend prestige to the initiative. Among the heavyweights are Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), Shoshana Zuboff (researcher, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), artists like Mark Ruffalo and Brian Eno, investor-activist Roger McNamee, and Cory Doctorow, perhaps the most prolific writer in the “people dissatisfied with big tech” genre.
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Cory wrote a long post on his blog this Wednesday (15th). An article that I found illogical, atypical coming from someone I admire and whose texts I read always leave me envious (“I wish I had written/thought of that”).
After praising several recent successes of Mastodon, the main application on the ActivityPub protocol, “rival” to the AT protocol, and criticizing the unfulfilled promise of decentralization by Bluesky, Cory suggests that the solution, via Free Our Feeds, is… to spend USD 30 million to reinvent the wheel at Bluesky. Mastodon? What?
The parallel the author draws with the music industry’s attack on Napster users at the turn of the millennium is imprecise and unfair. The analogy between data portability and fire exits in nightclubs is equally flawed.
It’s as if we were standing outside Meta’s bad club with no fire exits, after the bouncers beat up some random people, looking at two newly opened venues across the street: one with ready fire exits (Mastodon/ActivityPub), the other without (Bluesky). Where do we go? For Cory and Free Our Feeds, we should enter Bluesky and spend big money to build fire exits from the inside, while the party is already in full swing.
Although he claims to love Mastodon, Cory buys into the narrative that everyone there is boring and that people are having a blast on Bluesky, a network which, it’s worth remembering, is currently, for all practical purposes, as decentralized as X or Instagram (which is to say, not at all).
The parallel with the music industry, also in his article, is that telling people to bet on Mastodon is equivalent to the purists of the 2000s who claimed that resistance to the record labels’ legal harassment meant not listening to the pop music they published, in other words, a bunch of killjoys.
***
We already have a billionaire-proof social media. One that, on the same day Free Our Feeds appeared passing the hat to do who knows what within Bluesky, took a concrete step to consolidate its shield against capital by announcing a new governance structure, also non-profit, that will remove the final word from the founder and current CEO, Eugen Rochko, within the project.
Eugen never accepted venture capital, unlike Bluesky, which, less than three months after raising $15 million from a firm that — no joke — is called Blockchain, is in the market asking for more money from investors.
After the announcement of the new organizational structure, Eugen wrote a thread on his personal profile:
I don’t have a very high opinion of myself as a CEO, and I always imagine where Mastodon might’ve been today if I wasn’t a massive introvert, but I’d like to think there were redeeming qualities about my run, as well.
All the questionable episodes involving Bluesky, and how much almost everyone who claims to be dissatisfied with X or Meta ignores Mastodon, make me think…
Perhaps Eugen being “a massive introvert” is the exact reason Mastodon is what it is (the realization of a promise, of a vision) and yet is so ignored.
Bluesky sounds like the best solution someone trapped in Silicon Valley dynamics and venture capitalism mindset could come up with. It’s insufficient, it’s limited. This crowd lacks “thinking outside the box,” as they say (I think?) among them.
***
I don’t question the good intentions and good character of those involved in Free Our Feeds and Bluesky. I think it’s great that millions of people are having fun over there, but I’ve seen this movie too many times. I’m tired. I didn’t even plan to write this post; I’m glad it came out.
It seems that people say they want one thing, but in practice reject it when it’s offered to them. More or less like someone who says they’d like to eat better, but can’t resist a Big Mac? And I don’t say this to recriminate fans of bad sandwiches or pseudo-decentralized social networks. I too have my days of craving a hot dog. (That a pressed hot dog is better than a Big Mac, I think that’s indisputable!)
Perhaps it’s human nature to long for good things, but when faced with a decision, to delight in junk. Long live Bluesky?