This fucking Free Our Feeds bullshit is basically trying to do for Bluesky what Mozilla does for Google.

And guess what, there’s Mozilla’s executive director and president on as custodians alongside two guys from AI companies and the executive director of Meta partner Social Web Foundation.

I’m so bloody sick and tired of bloody Silicon Valley asshats sucking all the oxygen out of the room with their bullshit and I truly hope the folks roped into legitimising it realise this and distance themselves as quickly as possible (you know who you are).

https://freeourfeeds.com

#FreeOurFeeds #SiliconValley #SanFrancisco #BlueSky #SocialWebFoundation #bullshit

@anca @bsky.brid.gy I do hope they are seeing some of those #FreeOurFeeds funds!

Also interesting to catch up on #FreeOurFeeds. Remember them?

"Free Our Feeds wants to raise $30 million over three years, and has an immediate goal of $4 million to hire a small team and build independent infrastructure."

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/13/free-our-feeds-campaign-aims-to-billionaire-proof-blueskys-tech/

They're at $211,030 right now.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-free-social-media-from-billionaires

#SocialMedia

Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.

• @rudyfraser.com announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.

@edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".

• @bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy

• #FreeOurFeedsis donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.

Of course, like I said in the article,

""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."

And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.

Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.

@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye

#bluesky#ATmosphere

Interesting to look back at this five months later ... here's what's currently happening today in terms of decentralization the ATmosphere.

• @rudyfraser.com announced today that Blacksy feeds and moderation service are now powered by our own atproto relay -- and it's an independent implementation, not using Bluesky's reference code. It's really worth reading the thread, which has a great analogy for how a relay enables custom feeds.

@edavis.dev has configured deer.social (a third-party app) to to point to a self-hosted bsky appview which reads from a self-hosted relay which subscribes to a self-hosted PDS which is where this -- as he says, "Bluesky independent from Bluesky".

• @bnewbold published A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month, updating his post from last summer. The network size has increased by close to an order of magnitude since his first post; the cost of a realy

• #FreeOurFeedsis donating a $50K to the AT Community Fund to support the #IndieSky working group. The notes from last week's Ahoy IndieSky Europe give a sense of the energy here -- and also link to a bunch of other projects that sure look decentralized to me and discusses the prospects of Eurosky.

Of course, like I said in the article,

""Decentralization" means different things to different people. As the links in the Appendix highlight, people who are focusing on the (very real) concentration of power in the ATmosphere today, or the potentially-centralizing architecture of AT, find it more useful to describe Bluesky as centralized."

And the power concentration -- or "operational centralization" as Bluesky folks were calling it at the ATmosphere Conference -- is still very real. Bluesky still runs almost all of the infrastructure for the ATmosphere, and it's by far the most popular app, and most other apps (as well as Bluesky) use the Bluesky AppView, Relay, and labeler.

Then again, that's clearly in the process of changing, and it'll be interesting to see how it looks six months or a year from now.

@laurenshof @fediversereport @cyrus @cwebber @rysiek @jonny @possibledog @oblomov @rwg @Kye

#bluesky#ATmosphere

I think this article by @mmasnick.bsky.social is misleading re how hard it is to manage an #ActivityPub server (only moderate harassment) vs how hard it will (probably always) be to provide real competition to #bluesky (and thus prevent enshittification). But I am no expert. We desperately need an open direct debate (podcast not long articles most won't read, sorry) re all this by people who are. Good luck @pluralistic and #FreeOurFeeds. #SocialWeb

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-technological-poison-pill-how-atprotocol-encourages-competition-resists-evil-billionaires-lock-in-enshittification