Free Our Feeds - Update #1, Feb 2025
We launched Free Our Feeds a month ago. Since then the imperative to build independent, non-profit, and resilient infrastructure for social media has proven to be even more critical and urgent. We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes and are bringing forward our timelines.
Progress to Date: The Push to Raise $4M
Our priority is to get to the point where we can build an independent ATProto relay that can support archival and the full firehose. This relay will be hosted in Europe and we are in early discussions with European cloud providers. We want to get this up and running as soon as possible but we want it to be sustainable (yes we still like that term). That means we need to raise sufficient funds to cover servers, bandwidth, security and maintenance costs for a significant period of time; we need to look at issues around content moderation, compliance and more. The numbers add up quickly! So we’re targeting a $4m initial raise over the next 8 weeks.
Our crowdfunder is nearing $100k. If you can, help us get over the line here.
Our Long Term Vision: $30M by EOY
After we raise the $4M to get our relay off the ground, our attention will turn toward making our efforts sustainable for the long term. In addition to covering infrastructure costs up to 2029, our vision revolves around setting up an independent foundation with a full team to run and maintain this infrastructure – including the creation of a public interest fund to support open-source, public interest projects for social media. This fund would go toward supporting teams tackling critical issues in social media, such as efforts to enable the spread of high-quality news and information, safeguard the rights of vulnerable users, content moderation for underserved languages, and next-generation web search. The fund will help showcase the potentials for the decentralised web, highlighting new solutions and building prototypes to scale.
How we’re fundraising
You know about our crowdfunder. This is very important. Free Our Feeds is as much about building a community of people who care about the health of our information infrastructure as about building the infrastructure itself. We won’t raise the $4m or $30m though crowdfunding alone, we know that. But every donation makes a massive difference. If you can contribute please do; if you can share the fundraiser, please do.
We’re actively fundraising from philanthropy. This takes time of course. We’re talking to foundations and donors on both sides of the Atlantic. If you’re in that position or can make intros, please reach out to hello@freeourfeeds.com.
Community-building and outreach
Outside of our efforts to fundraise, we’ve been busy engaging with allies and supporters, and hosting discussions about the future of social media. Earlier this week, we organized our first in-person event in Paris, as a satellite of the AI Action Summit on the evening before it started. It was well attended and led to lively discussion. The opening panel was moderated by Jean Cattan (secrétaire général du Conseil National du Numérique) and featured:
- Marc Faddoul (AI Forensics and Free Our Feeds Custodian) who introduced Free Our Feeds and our plans.
- Magali Payen (On Est Pret & Hello Quit X) who talked about the very successful Hello Quit X campaign, including the tech developed to migrate users’ connections to Bluesky or Mastodon, and gave us a glimpse of their coming global expansion.
- Hannah Taieb (Spideo) who talked about Spideo’s business, built on selling transparent, explainable and controllable algorithms.
- This was followed by a very rich and dynamic discussion in the room. We finished off the evening with a relaxed informal reception.
We are in the process of organizing more events, including in Berlin, Brussels, London and online. These events will have different focuses: e.g. community building, policy and entrepreneurship. We’ll keep you updated in our newsletter and on our BSky account.
Engaging Policymakers: What’s the New Social Web Economy? That’s the subject of an upcoming whitepaper from our custodians Sherif Elsayed-Ali and Robin Berjon. It’s all about the coming transformation of the economics of the web thanks to decentralisation and open protocols. ETA early March.
Ways you can help
- Keep up to date by signing up to this newsletter and following Free Our Feeds on BlueSky
- Donate to our crowdfunder here
- If you’re interested in contributing in any way - technical, fundraising, outreach, other - please fill this form. We’ll be setting up a community/watercooler space shortly.
- Share with people who might be interested and can help.