As perhaps the first to use the phrase "free our feeds" and the Twitter hashtag #FreeOurFeeds, it is gratifying to see the launch of the Free Our Feeds Foundation to embark on a major step toward that vision.
There have been many small steps to free our feeds, now seen as an urgent need to "billionaire-proof" our social media connectivity. Musk and then Zuck have shown the perils of the "loaded weapon" we have left on the table of online discourse, by so shamelessly picking it up to use for their own ends. We can only guess where they -- and others like them -- or worse -- will point their weapons next.
Some see the Mastodon "fediverse" as a major step in this direction, arguably so, but many are coming to see Bluesky as a larger step toward the portability and open interoperability of the full range of functions needed to free us from platform lock-in and manipulation. It is also interesting that similar steps to more fully open the Bluesky and Mastodon ecosystems were announced on the same day, 1/13/25. I am hopeful that both efforts will succeed, and that the Mastodon and Bluesky ecosystems will grow -- and gain high levels of interoperability with each other.
Bluesky seems to currently be the most open to building high levels of function and extensibility, which I have always seen as very important. We are in the early days of social media, just learning to crawl. To leverage this technology so that we can walk, run, and fly -- while remaining democratic and free -- it must be kept open to user control and to the control of communities. That will enable us to re-energize the social mediation ecosystem I have written about recently, and in many other works listed here.
A key aspect of Bluesky and its AT Protocol (not yet in the Mastodon architecture as I understand it) is that, at the level of both 1) the app, and 2) of the relays that tie app instances together, each can be separately managed and replicated, along with 3) the level of independently selectable feed algorithms. The federation of the relays is important because they are resource heavy services, not very amenable to lightly resourced community managers, but capable of being secured and managed by trusted organizations to support advanced algorithms in ways that can also preserve privacy, as I described in 11/3/21 and updated in Tech Policy Press. The Free Our Feeds Foundation promises to take a large step in that direction for the Bluesky ecosystem
As Cory Doctorow, Mr. Enshittification, himself, said of this effort:
If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.
Of course 2021 was not very long ago, and many people had already become advocates for algorithmic choice. But I also take pride in being perhaps the longest-serving advocate for these ideas.
