A decentralized movement is happening on the outskirts of social media: Mastodon’s CEO is transferring ownership of the social platform to a new nonprofit, and a new initiative aims to protect the infrastructure that Bluesky is built on from the whims of billionaire owners.
The Big Picture: Amid X’s transformation under Elon Musk and existential changes happening at Meta (again), digital activists are working to designate emerging social platforms as “digital infrastructure” that won’t allow sudden political winds to change the direction of their mission: to be open and safe platforms for online expression.
Behind the Algorithm: Decentralized social media is trying to give power to the people in a decidedly different way than X and Meta.
- Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko is transferring ownership of the platform to a new nonprofit based in Europe. The founder will take a new role in overseeing product strategy. Nothing is expected to change about the platform with the transfer.
- An initiative called Free Our Feeds — supported by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, actor Mark Ruffalo, and others — is raising money to launch a public-interest foundation to protect the AT Protocol.
- That would allow the underlying protocol to remain free from investor/owner pressure to change, even if the individual platforms do.
The Future: While no platforms on either the AT Protocol (Bluesky) or the ActivityPub protocol (Mastodon) are anywhere near as popular as Facebook, Instagram, or X, they are growing. In particular, Bluesky has been surging in users making an exodus from X, and it’s supportive of the Free Our Feeds movement. That could be the beginning of a vibe shift. And with TikTok potentially going away this week, it leaves a vacuum for a new type of social media to get some daylight.
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