Free Our Feeds - Update #3, July 2025

It's been a busy two months since our last update, with lots of news for both Free Our Feeds and energy in the ATProto ecosystem. And of course, ever-evolving drama among the billionaire class of social media owners. With Free Our Feeds, we're focused less on drama and more on making moves, and we're excited to share our latest with you.

Ian paints Elon

The portrait artist Ian Bruce recently managed, over the course of a week, to simultaneously paint an "ages of Elon Musk portrait" and interview a rotating cast of characters with strong opinions about our current socio-technical dystopia, all on livestream. Ian generously used this performance as an opportunity to support Free Our Feeds, and is donating the proceeds to the campaign. 

Ian, a member of the UK's Hard Art Collective, corralled Brian Eno, Rosie O'Donnell, Carol Cadwalladr, Mark Ruffalo, Yanis Varoufakis, Alex Winter, Jay Griffiths, John Cusack and others in wide-ranging and rollicking conversations, shared across a range of platforms including, ahem, Bluesky.

Fundraising progress

We're very grateful for your support, and happy to announce that we've received well over 2,000 individual donations since we began, totaling some $172,000. We have also received $150,000 in support from philanthropies. We're now ⅔ of the way to our initial funding target of $500,000. 

We're continuing with our online donations drive, as we think that it's vital that this initiative be funded by a broad spectrum of supporters. We are happy to report that we're continuing to see a steady flow of contributions every week. 

Putting our money where our mouths are

We're aware that ATProto is having a moment, and also that we need to work fast. We're putting the funds we've raised to work. 

Our new commitments follow a grant in May of $50,000 to Indiesky, a working group of the ATProto Community Fund, to build community and independent ATProto infrastructure. They include:

$50,000 to support research into how ATProto's architecture relates to regulatory obligations, particularly around content moderation. Clarifying regulatory responsibilities is key to any maturing technology; we are particularly concerned with the ability of developers and platform operators to respond to the requirements of regulations such as Europe's Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. This research will lay groundwork for clarifying relationships to many regulatory regimes and enable novel content moderation solutions.

$40,000 toward the building of a commons for content moderation, which we're calling CoCoMo. CoCoMo should lower the barrier to entry for developers and communities who want to use ATProto, but may not have the funds or capacity to manage the very real obligations to manage content moderation. The initial focus of CoCoMo will be as a shared moderation system for European projects, which we are organizing as part of a newly announced initiative we are calling Eurosky. 

Under the Eurosky initiative, we aim to build European social media infrastructure to power social web applications and services, focusing on building tools for developers and companies, rather than consumer-facing apps. It is a collaboration of people and initiatives, including several of our custodians, Robin Berjon and Sherif Elsayed-Ali, together with Sebastian Vogelsang, the founder and CEO of the ATProto photo-sharing application, Flashes. Eurosky also intends to operate several components in the service of independent ATProto development, including a European Personal Data Server (PDS) provider, a relay, and an index.

A strategic roadmap

We are building a strategic roadmap for our contribution to the technosocial ecosystem around ATProto. We aim to catalyze financial, technical, policy and governance, and cultural resources, and raise funds to create and support initiatives, projects and organizations.

This approach will support a robust and diverse community of technologists and creators to build a new generation of internet infrastructure and applications that can't be captured by surveillance-based, extractive business models. The goal here is larger than the success of any one platform, application, or community; it is making the case for a "both/and" understanding of information infrastructure, with incentives and benefits for participating in a kind of "public data commons."

To that end, we are concentrating on three key support functions:

• Incubating ATProto technology and financial ecosystem development by developing a range of funding instruments
• Supporting information and knowledge creation, including advancing the technical specifications, governance, and standards of ATProto, and related policy work, in order to support communities of technologists, creators, advocates, legal experts and researchers
• Advocating for and supporting cultural, informational and civic participation to help drive demand for technologies built on ATProto and other open social applications

Our working hypothesis is that we will develop an independent organization based in Europe to house technology development and services, knowledge governance and policy work, and social participation. We also aim to support partners and aligned initiatives around the world. And, we are looking into investment vehicles, such as venture studios, grants mechanisms, and other financial support approaches appropriate for infrastructure and ecosystem investment. 

This approach underpins the logic for our support to both the ATProto Community Fund's Indiesky work and the Eurosky initiative, adding capacity to build technology, organize events and speed access to resources for developers and ATProto technical development. This approach is rooted in collaboration with both individual developers and initiatives, to create and sustain momentum around approaches that prove valuable and useful.

Organizational support

Exchange Point, a US 501(c)(3) is generously acting as our fiscal sponsor. We are also benefiting from in-kind support from our custodians, and in some cases, their organizations.

Building alliances

To advance our vision, we thrilled to be listening, collaborating, and sharing with initiatives and entities such as Indiesky, Flashes, the Eurostack Project, Newsmast Foundation, Skywatch, IPFS Foundation, Graze Social, ROOST, Kobler, and DPGA, and we're meeting others every week. Please reach out if you want to chat, share an idea or get involved!

Speaking and writing

We've been keeping a busy schedule of speaking and writing around the world. A few of the many talks from the past few months include:

Mallory Knodel on privacy, interoperability, and the Fediverse, at the Internet Governance Forum.

Ivan Sigal on how atproto relates to civic infrastructure, information and media, at the Media Impact Forum.

Robin Berjon on democratizing the digital world, at re:publica. 

Sherif Elsayed-Ali's podcast System Change, on the value of an open social ecosystem, and discussion on possibilities for a resilient European tech sovereignty, at the EU Presidency's Digital Summit.

And look for us in the coming months at events around the world. For starters, Mallory and Robin will be at IETF in Madrid, July 19-25, and Ivan will be at Protocols for Publishers in New York, August 20-21.

Connecting

Find us on our website at freeourfeeds.com and on Bluesky at @freeourfeeds.com!