Free Our Feeds - Update #2, May 2025
A lot has happened since our last update in February: loads of activity in the ATProto ecosystem and, of course looking at the bigger picture, the Trump administration’s policies have upended geopolitical relations.
Technology is at the forefront of these changes – it’s become clearer than ever that having the platforms, products and services we use everyday concentrated in a handful of companies is very dangerous. The public launch of Bluesky last year opened people’s imagination to what might be possible outside the closed, controlled platforms of Big Tech. In the last few months the conversation has expanded in scope and breadth, with initiatives like Eurostack gaining significant momentum.
So what have we been up to?
We have two big announcements to share with you:
#1 Supporting IndieSky
The first project Free Our Feeds is supporting is IndieSky – an initiative by the ATProto Community Fund to explore and develop independent ATProto infrastructure.
FOF is providing $50k of funding to the IndieSky project to support: running the group; funding initial R&D on infrastructure software, setup, and tooling; and supporting developers and commons infrastructure projects with small donations.
The AT Protocol has a wickedly cool and wildly inventive community, and the ATProto Community Fund has done outstanding work to support them with their first initiatives: ATmosphereConf and the Location Data project.
"For Free Our Feeds to partner with ATProto Community Fund was a very easy decision to make and we're fantastically excited to be able to support them in continuing their work." - Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com, Free Our Feeds custodian, IPFS Foundation, and DASL project lead
For more details see this post from the ATProto Community Fund team – Boris Mann, Ted Han and Nick Gerakines.
#2 Welcoming FOF’s Director
We are delighted to welcome Ivan Sigal as Free Our Feed’s Director (interim). We are incredibly lucky to have Ivan on board, bringing vast experience in media, technology, information, human rights and the arts.
Ivan was the executive director of Global Voices for 16 years, building it into one of the most impactful organizations globally at the intersection of media, information and technology.
Ivan specializes in the design and support of communities, collaboratives and media initiatives and civic organizations. He has had numerous affiliations with academic and research institutions, including fellowships at the Library of Congress and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Ivan has supported and advised a wide range of public interest initiatives and organizations globally. You can find out more about him here.
Ivan will bring a focus to Free Our Feeds that we know we need. All the custodians have been working on Free Our Feeds on top of their day jobs – we love doing this work and will continue to support the campaign but we know that something with the ambition of Free Our Feeds needs dedicated leadership to make it a success.
You asked: why do you want to raise $30m?
That’s the ahem $30m dollar question. After all, running a relay is a lot cheaper these days, on the order of $50/month.
Let us reassure you straight away: we’re not planning to run a relay for 50,000 years, although that would be an interesting challenge.
We want to re-align the incentives of the social web ecosystem, helping many more new apps and communities (like pioneering efforts such as Blacksky) spring up. We want to see content moderation services focused on underserved languages, broadcasters and media stepping into the space, and new ways to support science publishing.
We are supporting the development of fully independent infrastructure that enables the development and running of social apps that can serve tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. We want to see a social internet built on open protocols and interoperability – and it’s not just about having a great microblogging service like Bluesky, we want to see all kinds of social apps, search, news services and much more emerging from the community.
The community is full of talented developers who've already built amazing services with very little, if any, funding. But we're up against incredible odds and we can't win only on volunteer work of tiny bits of funding. People should be paid, services need to be resilient and products should be well-resourced. We need to be ambitious.
And that will take $30m, as a start.
We think this is a fraction of the money that will be needed to remake the social web from where it is today - with the dominance of Big Tech - to a future where billions of internet users control their online lives. We need many more initiatives – public, non-profit and private to make this happen.
But we’re not waiting to raise millions, we will be deploying funds as quickly and as effectively as possible towards our goal. To date we have raised a little over $100k through crowdfunding. We’re using half of it to support Indiesky and half to partially fund the new director position.
We are hoping to announce more funding in the coming weeks and multiply that amount over the coming months.
What we’ve been up to
Marc Fadoul, FOF custodian, presented the Free Our Feeds vision and roadmap at the ATmosphere in Seattle in March and at AHOY in Hamburg in April. Those were the first two conferences dedicated to the AT protocol and decentralized social media, and have been unique occasions for this community to gather on both sides of the Atlantic.
Two of our custodians, Sherif Elsayed-Ali and Robin Berjon, co-authored a policy paper titled Algorithmic Pluralism: Towards Competitive & Innovative Information Ecosystems. The paper looks at the shift towards decentralization and interoperability on the web and, in particular, the opportunities this creates to make social media more diverse, innovative and healthier. The paper touches on the role of ATProto and ActivityPub in this shift. You can find the paper here.
Robin and Sherif took part in a live event on the same topic with Bluesky’s Emily Liu. The event also featured a discussion with Marietje Schaake, author of The Tech Coup, former MEP and Stanford fellow. You can watch it here.
Some organizational updates
Nabiha Syed (Mozilla Foundation) has stepped down as custodian due to a very busy schedule. We’re hugely grateful for all the energy and expertise she has brought. Nabiha was instrumental in getting Free Our Feeds off the ground and will continue supporting on an informal basis. Thank you Nabiha!
And a big welcome to Alix Dunn, who has been supporting Free Our Feeds in the background from the get-go, but has now officially joined as custodian. Alix brings significant expertise at the intersection of technology, media, organizational development and philanthropy. She is founder and CEO of Computer Says Maybe, a public interest firm that runs the New Protagonist Network, develops media about technology politics, and facilitates key convenings on emerging technology topics with social and political implications. Alix is also a senior advisor for AI Now and the AI Collaborative and sits on the advisory boards of Foxglove, RealML, and is a trustee of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI & Society. Previously, she co-founded and directed The Engine Room.
And we changed to a new fiscal sponsor, Exchange Point Institute, a US-based 501(c)(3), who will hold funds raised on behalf of Free Our Feeds.
And Finally…
Keep an eye out for our new website, which will be launching in the next two weeks at freeourfeeds.com