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Free Our Feeds is not trying to buy Bluesky, turn the Bluesky app into a nonprofit, or replace it. The campaign wants to make the open-source AT Protocol behind Bluesky less dependent on Bluesky’s company, its investors, or any future billionaire owner.
Its plan is to create an independent public-interest foundation, fund competing applications and developers, and help operate infrastructure—especially another relay—outside Bluesky. The broader goal is to give users credible alternatives if control of the ecosystem ever becomes concentrated.
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The distinction that matters: Bluesky, the app, and AT Protocol
“Bluesky” can refer to three different things:
- Bluesky the company: a commercial organization that develops and operates services.
- The Bluesky app: the social-media product most users interact with.
- AT Protocol: the open-source technical framework intended to support Bluesky and other social applications.
Free Our Feeds is focused primarily on the third item. Its argument is not that Bluesky is currently controlled by a billionaire. Rather, the campaign says an open protocol could still become practically dependent on one company if that company operates the most important infrastructure, builds the only widely used application, and attracts most of the users and developers.
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That distinction also explains why the campaign is not an ownership-transfer plan. It is trying to build a larger ecosystem around AT Protocol so Bluesky is one participant—not the unavoidable gateway.
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Free Our Feeds launched in January 2025 as a campaign associated with the Modal Foundation. Its public supporters have included figures such as Jimmy Wales, Mark Ruffalo, Alex Winter, Cory Doctorow, Brian Eno, Audrey Tang, and Shoshana Zuboff, along with advocates connected to organizations including Mozilla, Avaaz, and the Social Web Foundation. Public support should not be confused with operational responsibility: the campaign’s organizers, custodians, technical contributors, and signatories are not necessarily the same people.
The campaign describes its goals and supporters on its official page.
Why the campaign emerged
The project grew out of concern about concentrated control of large social platforms. Elon Musk’s ownership of X and Mark Zuckerberg’s voting control at Meta have become prominent examples of how a powerful owner can influence a platform’s policies, moderation, product direction, and public role.
Bluesky attracted many users leaving X after changes to that service’s moderation and political environment. Free Our Feeds argues that moving users from one centralized service to another would not solve the underlying structural problem. Its aim is to ensure that the technology attracting those users can support multiple independent companies, nonprofits, applications, and infrastructure operators.
The campaign’s phrase “billionaire-proof” is therefore best understood as an institutional and political goal, not a formal technical property. It means making unilateral control harder by distributing infrastructure, funding, governance, and user choice.
Free Our Feeds’ vision statement sets out that rationale, while TechCrunch’s launch coverage provides additional context.
What the fundraising targets are meant to pay for
The campaign announced several funding milestones:
| Target | Stated purpose |
|---|---|
| $500,000 | Early technical, community, and organizing work. |
| $4 million | Establishing a public-interest foundation, hiring a small team, building an independently hosted relay, supporting important technical components, and funding outside developers. |
| $30 million over three years | Developing a mature open social standard with multiple applications and sustainable shared infrastructure. |
These are campaign targets, not a purchase price, investment round, or budget for Bluesky. The campaign page reported nearly $330,000 from more than 2,150 individual donations as of July 2025. That is a dated figure, not a confirmed 2026 total, and it does not demonstrate that the $4 million foundation plan or the wider $30 million program has been completed.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteIn May 2025, the AT Protocol Community site also reported that Free Our Feeds made an initial $50,000 donation to an IndieSky working group. That is evidence of a specific funding commitment, not proof that a complete independent infrastructure network is already operating.
See the campaign’s fundraising update and the IndieSky announcement for the dated claims.
How AT Protocol works in plain language
AT Protocol is designed as a stack of services rather than a single website. The main components do different jobs:
- Personal Data Server (PDS): stores a user’s signed repository, posts, account information, and related data. It is closer to the user’s data home than to a conventional social-media profile page.
- Relay: collects and distributes large amounts of activity from across the network. A relay is closer to a network-wide aggregation and distribution service than to an ordinary user account.
- App view: turns collected data into user-facing features such as feeds, search, profiles, lists, and metrics.
- Feed generator: produces a particular algorithmic feed or ranking experience.
- Labeler: provides moderation or classification labels that applications can use when deciding how content should be displayed.
Bluesky’s federation documentation and AT Protocol’s stack guide describe these relationships in more technical detail.
Why an independent relay matters
A relay is important because an application needs a way to discover and process activity at network scale. It can gather events from many personal data servers and make them available to app views and other services.
Bluesky’s documentation says that anyone can host a relay in principle, but also warns that relays are resource-intensive. Running one at useful scale requires storage, bandwidth, indexing, monitoring, security, maintenance, and systems for handling abuse and outages. That is a much larger undertaking than running a personal data server for a small community.
An independent relay could provide:
- Resilience: another route for collecting and distributing network activity.
- Competition: an infrastructure counterweight to services operated by or closely associated with Bluesky.
- Access for developers: a way for outside applications and researchers to build without relying on one organization for the entire network view.
- Institutional independence: infrastructure governed and funded separately from Bluesky’s corporate priorities.
But a second relay alone would not create a complete alternative to Bluesky. Users would also need usable app views, applications, feeds, moderation services, operators, funding, and support.
What account portability does—and does not—promise
AT Protocol is designed around portable identities and signed data repositories. In principle, a user can move an account between personal data servers rather than losing the identity associated with a single company.
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Practical portability depends on several conditions:
- The receiving provider must support the relevant protocol features and data structures.
- Users must have access to the credentials or recovery mechanisms needed for migration.
- The new service must provide compatible hosting, media handling, moderation, and application features.
- Feeds, search results, labels, settings, and other application-specific elements may not transfer identically.
- The alternative service must have enough capacity and users to offer a genuinely useful experience.
A user may also change applications without changing the personal data server that hosts the account. Conversely, a user can have an independent data server while still relying on Bluesky’s relay or app view. Independence is therefore a matter of the whole service chain, not one setting.
See the AT Protocol overview and AT Protocol FAQ for the protocol’s portability model.
What “billionaire-proof” can realistically mean
Free Our Feeds’ objective has at least four parts:
Technical independence
Multiple organizations should be able to run relays, app views, personal data servers, feeds, and moderation services. This reduces the chance that one operator becomes a single point of failure or control.
Economic independence
Shared infrastructure and developer work need durable funding. Otherwise, an ecosystem may remain formally open while depending on one company, venture-capital fund, or wealthy donor to pay the bills.
Governance independence
A public-interest foundation could separate stewardship of common infrastructure and standards from Bluesky’s corporate leadership and investors. Its effectiveness would depend on its charter, board selection, donor disclosures, conflict-of-interest rules, spending controls, and succession arrangements.
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Users need credible alternative applications and providers—not merely theoretical compatibility. The strongest test is whether someone can move to another service while retaining a meaningful identity, social graph, and ability to participate.
This approach cannot guarantee that no powerful company, investor, government, or infrastructure provider will ever gain influence. Open source does not automatically produce decentralization, and a nonprofit is not automatically immune to concentrated control.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The trade-offs the campaign must solve
Openness versus cost
Anyone may be able to inspect or reuse the code, but operating a large relay or app view can be expensive. Storage, bandwidth, indexing, security, monitoring, abuse response, and staff all create barriers that code licensing does not remove.
Choice versus fragmentation
Multiple applications and app views can give users more choice, but they can also produce different feeds, search results, moderation policies, and definitions of what is visible. Interoperability does not mean every service will show the same content.
Portability versus continuity
An account may be portable at the protocol level while losing some practical continuity during a move. A receiving service may not support every feature, moderation relationship, media arrangement, or application-specific setting.
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Publishing versus distribution
AT Protocol separates the ability to publish data from the ability to distribute it widely. A post can exist in the network but be omitted from a particular app view, feed, search index, or moderation-filtered experience. That means decentralization does not eliminate decisions about reach.
Public-interest goals versus donor influence
A foundation can still be influenced by its donors or leadership. Transparency, board accountability, financial reporting, technical governance, and limits on conflicts of interest matter as much as the organization’s label.
How to judge whether the campaign is succeeding
The campaign’s success should not be measured only by whether Bluesky remains independent. More useful indicators would include:
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- Independent app views that can operate at useful scale.
- Applications with different purposes, rather than only Bluesky replicas.
- Sustainable funding beyond an initial donation drive.
- Transparent governance and enforceable conflict-of-interest rules.
- Account migration that ordinary users can complete successfully.
- Independent moderation and labeling services.
- Clear technical standards that outside implementations can follow.
- Operational resilience, including backups, failover, security, and abuse response.
- A sufficiently large user base to create real choice.
These tests focus on practical power. A project can be open-source and technically interoperable yet remain too expensive, obscure, or small for users to switch.
The unresolved questions
Several important questions require answers as the effort develops:
- Who legally controls the proposed foundation, and how are its custodians or directors selected?
- What donor disclosures and conflict-of-interest policies apply?
- Who will operate the relay, and how will storage, bandwidth, security, and staff be funded?
- Can independent app views attract enough users and developers to remain viable?
- How will migration work for ordinary users, not only technically sophisticated ones?
- What happens if Bluesky changes the protocol, its implementation, or the terms around its infrastructure?
- How will alternative services handle spam, harassment, illegal content, and other abuse?
- Can a foundation protect shared infrastructure without controlling every application built on AT Protocol?
These are not objections to the campaign’s premise. They are the practical questions that determine whether an open protocol becomes a functioning public ecosystem or remains dependent on the company that built its most visible implementation.
Bottom line
Free Our Feeds is best understood as an effort to build institutional and infrastructural counterweights around AT Protocol. It is not an acquisition of Bluesky and not a claim that the Bluesky app is already billionaire-controlled.
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The campaign addresses a genuine weakness: open-source software can still become practically centralized when one company operates the dominant relay, app view, application, and developer ecosystem. Its plan—an independent foundation, another relay, and funding for alternative applications—could make user choice and account portability more meaningful.
But “billionaire-proof” remains a goal rather than a verified outcome. The decisive evidence will be whether multiple organizations can sustainably operate the network, whether users can move without losing meaningful access, and whether governance and funding remain genuinely independent.
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