What's up with the Free Our Feeds campaign?

A new tech movement was launched last week surrounding the AT Protocol, the protocol that BlueSky sits on. ‘Free our Feeds’ seeks to ‘save social media from billionare capture’, which is quite a noble and ambitious goal. When you go to the website, you’d be welcome by a giant ‘Donate Now’ button which leads you to their page on GoFundMe (a questionable choice for a campaign rooted in ideals of decentralisation and independence tbh)

The campaign, backed by 9 custodians (see pic below), are asking for 4 Million USD and have raised at least over 70k at the time of writing. The campaign has a decent goal that thousands, if not millions, of people who are sick of closed-source, centralised social media platforms can get behind with. And sure have they captured big names, as plastered on their home page, to sign their open letter titled ‘Will you help us to free social media from billionaire control?’

Look if I read this 8 years ago, I would be so into it and wouldn’t even dare reading what they’re actually trying to do. Gone was that version of me. Some would even say that version of Jean was long dead. So I went through their FAQs to actually ‘understand’ what they want. But I ended up more confused after reading than I was before I started. I don’t know what they’re trying to do aside asking for money. After reading, I am left with the following questions:

Why the heck is there a necessity to have a separate foundation when this was the whole selling point of Bluesky from the very beginning? You know, the Bluesky that has resources and a vested interest in public governance of the AT Protocol? Why funnel additional resources into a separate but identical mission?

The only difference I see from BlueSky PBC)and this campaign hangs on a very thin thread, which is the argument Free Our Feeds is making. Free Our Feeds (its so annoying to type this repeatedly) framed the current structures as insufficient to fully guarantee the long-term independence of the AT Protocol. Sure. But everything else that followed seems redundant. If Bluesky already shares the vision of decentralisation and public governance, why is an entirely separate foundation necessary? Not to mention that Bluesky is already working toward creating a public governance model for the AT Protocol. The existence of a PBC obligates the company to consider public benefit in their decision-making processes. That by itself is not a gurantee of course, and I guess this is where Free Our Feeds is positioning itself by establishing a independent public-interest foundation (them) to steward the AT Protocol.

What actual guarantee is there that the foundation would do a better job than Bluesky? The pitch just boils down to just trust me, bro.

They are asking for a HUGE amount of money for this foundation to even start. The distribution of these funds is to be decided by the custodians, but beyond their oversight, the granularity of how exactly every dollar will be used remains kinda vague. I mean, if you’re gunna ask 4M, maybe have an actual plan on how you plan to do it instead of giving us 3 bullet points mentioning ‘vibrant ecosystem’, ‘relay’ and estbalishing a foundation.

Lastly, before I go out and walk my dog, for a campaign with a stated vision of ‘interoperability between open social media platforms’, it is odd how they downloayed Activity pub and rather invest on costly development of a second relay especially when the AT Protocol has yet to achieve widespread adoption.

The only mention of ActivityPub is in this paragraph:

It is rather a missed opprotunity for Free Our Feeds esp since ActivityPub is already adopted by a range of platforms that align with the decentralised and open social media ethos. ActivityPub has already achieved what "Free Our Feeds" aspires to, which is interoperability between platforms. While there are gaps in this (DIDs for example), I dont think that justifies sidelining ActivityPub in favour of expensive investment.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, they actually could really make a difference with that amount of money.

Question stands still, what do they actually want to do? Maybe I am just missing something here and this is all just my hallucinations.