In a scene from 2010’s The Social Network, a young Mark Zuckerberg sits down for dinner with Sean Parker, the playboy entrepreneur and founder of Napster. For those too young to remember Napster: it’s the reason we now have Spotify. Played by Justin Timberlake, Parker asks Zuckerberg a question which, looking back on it, feels almost quaint. “What’s better than a million dollars?” he says, teasing the future valuation of Facebook. Zuckerberg has never dared answer a question he doesn’t know the answer to – nor a statement articulated as a question that isn’t actually a question. So, after a pause, it falls to Parker to utter the three magic words: “A billion dollars”.
Fast forward to 2025. Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company – which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram – is currently valued at $1.52 trillion. That’s one thousand, five hundred and two billion. Zuckerberg is personally worth $211.1bn.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has a personal net worth higher than the GDP of his native South Africa. The value of his social media platform, X, is unclear – some estimates suggest it could be as low as $8bn, a far cry from the $44bn he paid for it in 2022 – but it doesn’t matter. Musk pumps out hundreds of tweets a day and is reshaping markets and global politics as he goes. Via X, he is becoming something approximating the king of the world – assuming, as the stereotype goes, that kings throw temper tantrums and suffer from impulse control disorder.
Either way, it’s a realisation that’s struck fear into the hearts of many. “Social media is the space for public discourse and should be controlled by our democratic processes, not the autocratic whims of billionaires,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, an executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, said yesterday. For a long time, pretendents like him have been urging the general public to migrate from the major platforms and towards more tailored alternatives: CounterSocial, WeAre8, Substack. Perhaps the most compelling alternative so far is Bluesky, founded by the man who set up Twitter and sold it to Elon: Jack Dorsey.
What makes BlueSky distinctive is the fact that it has no owner. Dorsey resigned from the company’s board last May and things have since been run by CEO Jay Garber. It operates under the banner of a public benefit corporation. Now, a consortium of tech leaders is stepping in to protect Bluesky from what they assume will be the same fate as X or Reddit (sites that prioritise and recompense fringe views). Even as The Guardian announced it would stop publishing on X, doing so on Bluesky instead since November, the paper’s star columnist Marina Hyde was quick to point out these things all end up part of the same hamster wheel. People ditch a platform they’ve lost faith in, start over on a new one, and repeat.
Which brings me to the consortium. The group is made up of tech entrepreneurs, scholars and various advocates including actor Mark Ruffalo, filmmaker Alex Winter, musician Brian Eno and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. It is leading a $30m fundraising campaign called Free our Feeds. Nine custodians (six men, three women, all of them entrepreneurs) plan to kickstart the foundation and register it as a non-profit in the US. The news was first reported by Taylor Lorenz, an American journalist and “queen of the internet”. “They basically want to build Bluesky out from one company into a whole ecosystem of different apps and companies by making a non profit foundation that opens up its underlying technology so anyone can build on it”, she wrote on her Substack (where else?).
What she describes here is an open-source project designed to “reclaim” social media. The people behind Free Our Feeds “want to leverage this tech to create […] an ecosystem focused on individual control, creativity, community wellbeing, and free expression.” It comes after Meta announced last week that it would replace third-party fact checkers with an X-like system of community notes, and lift restrictions on content moderation for such issues as gender identity and immigration. “Mark Zuckerberg [went] full Musk last week,” the campaign message on the Free Our Feeds website begins.
Their open letter targets Elon Musk more specifically. “We are former Twitter users who cherished the platform and the communities we built there over the years,” it reads. “However, we’ve also seen the quality of our feeds decline as one person took over what we had believed to be a global public square, using it for his own political and business objectives. We can’t let that happen ever again.”
There are two problems with their proposed alternative. The first is that open-source technology comes with a lack of accountability. Take Meta. The company has developed its own open-source large language model (called Llama), via which it’s developed an AI assistant accessible on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Two months ago, Meta organised a Red Bull-fuelled “hackathon” for design engineers and computer scientists using Llama to build their own sovereign technologies (a medical triage app to help the NHS, for instance, or a prosthetic arm that helps the infirm drink a glass of water). Meta does not own these inventions, but it can benefit down the line if they do well. The fact that they’re built using the same “underlying technology” means they are interoperable with Meta’s platforms. If one of the innovations goes horribly wrong, however, Meta can just as easily wash its hands of it.
The tech underlying Bluesky is called the AT Protocol; the corporation has pledged to transfer its development to a standards body like the Internet Engineering Task Force. In theory, the open-source model means the technology can only improve; it relies on people in the community trusting each other enough to make changes to the public code that will ameliorate each user’s experience. I cannot help, however, but notice a striking dissonance between this and the outrage which the Free Our Feeds signatories expressed at Meta’s decision to adopt a system of community notes – which, by any estimation, is a more democratic process than outsourcing fact-checking to third parties.
The problem with social media in general is that we worry more about other people’s naivety than our own
In 2023, a team of researchers from Oxford published a study titled "People Believe Misinformation Is a Threat Because They Assume Others Are Gullible". It argued that the outrage caused by ditching fact checkers, as X had already done by then, was due to users being afraid others would fall for fake news. The problem with social media in general is that we worry more about other people’s naivety than our own. This is how echo chambers are created. It appears Bluesky will be no different.
Which brings me to the second problem: as far as the general public is concerned, these things rarely fly. WeAre8, a predecessor to Bluesky that calls itself “the people’s platform”, has been limping along for years despite garnering support from Rio Ferdinand, whose face was plastered all over billboards flogging the app to Londoners two years ago. Addictive algorithms, the copy on the website reads, have “forced more ads and less friends into our feeds” (fewer, guys, it’s fewer) and “turned humanity into the largest unconscious and unpaid workforce in human history”. This is, as they say, a bit much.
It’s likely the Free Our Feeds initiative will be a success. Its fundraising target is not so absurdly high that it feels unreachable and there is sweeping support for a decentralised platform among disaffected former tweeters. But spinning out a social media app into an interoperable ecosystem is a different thing to actually getting people to adopt it. And relying on the goodwill of users to ensure that “free expression” and “community wellbeing” are upheld is akin to relying on a fourth-century doctor to perform advanced brain surgery.
