MONTREAL — Free Our Feeds, an international collective of tech leaders, is launching a fundraising campaign to try and keep Bluesky out of the hands of billionaires. 

The group, whose supporters include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Mozilla Foundation president Mark Surman, aims to raise US$30 million over three years to back Bluesky’s open-source mission, even in the event Bluesky doesn’t.

The money will be used to establish a public-interest foundation to support the platform’s open source software and build independent infrastructure to ensure users have access to and control over their data, regardless of Bluesky’s corporate decisions.

Nabiha Syed, executive director of the open-source Mozilla Foundation, is helping lead the collective. Actor Mark Ruffalo is also a supporter. Montreal tech entrepreneur Philippe Beaudoin is one of nine Free Our Feeds custodians charged with setting up the non-profit foundation within six months of the close of the fund.

When Beaudoin created his Bluesky account in 2023, Beaudoin said the vibes were very Twitter circa 2012: all the playful snark, none of the vitriol. Yet he saw a potential Twitter-like cautionary tale in Bluesky’s recent explosive growth following an exodus from Elon Musk’s X.

Free Our Feeds will make Bluesky “fully resistant to billionaire capture,” the organization claims, while building out a mirror version of the platform should a billionaire capture it nonetheless. Doing so, he said, would effectively allow someone else to relaunch Bluesky should it get shut down or corralled off by a new owner. 

The idea is simple and quite possibly naive: by billionaire-proofing Bluesky, Free Our Feeds will shield the platform from the rapid-growth ravages of Big Tech, in which engagement and profits have typically trumped civility and user experience. 

While Bluesky’s infrastructure and underlying technology is public, the company behind it isn’t. “Free Our Feeds is not about simply endorsing Bluesky the app, but guaranteeing that the open social media infrastructure that they have built remains operated in the public interest,” said Beaudoin. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Free Our Feeds’s plan drops at a serendipitous time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company was dropping its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., introduced at the beginning of Donald Trump’s first presidency, because fact checkers are “too politically biased.” He favourably name-checked X’s community notes system before announcing his intention to move Meta’s moderation staff from California to Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” 

If Zuckerberg’s announcement laid bare the extent to which platforms are at the mercy of their  billionaire owners, it also reinforced the importance of keeping Bluesky from slipping under the thumbs of these very billionaires.

The notion of having to billionaire-proof Bluesky would have been laughable as recently as six months ago. Co-founded in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and launched in 2023, the platform looked and felt like Twitter, minus the enormous user base, convenient features and hassle-free authentication process. Never mind that, at times, posting on Bluesky was like shouting off a cliff to a handful of bored friends and colleagues. 

People on Twitter, as it was then called, forever disgruntled with their platform-cum-addiction, often threatened to leave for Bluesky. They rarely did—until they did en masse, tripling the upstart platform’s userbase since September 2024. It certainly helped, too, that the experience on Bluesky was, for many, generally more positive than on X.

Free Our Feeds is a sign of Bluesky’s sudden importance, in that there is considerable interest, and very likely tens of millions of dollars, in making sure it doesn’t become another X. The collective has been in contact with Graber, and Beaudoin says Bluesky is supportive of the initiative. Yet Free Our Feeds’ very existence suggests even companies with the purest of intentions—like Bluesky’s parent company, Bluesky Social PBC, which trades in words like “transparency” and “innovation” and “decentralization”—can’t avoid enshitification on its own. 

While Bluesky hasn’t ruled out advertising, the open source nature of the platform dictates that selling stuff to people can’t be a dominant revenue source. Bluesky has also pledged not to sell user data to advertisers, instead relying on the less lucrative measures like selling premium subscriptions and domain names to keep the lights on. Bluesky’s reluctance to pursue lucrative revenue streams like advertising and data sales has arguably kneecapped its fundraising. For all its explosive growth and buzz, the company has raised all of US$36 million, according to Pitchbook data. 

In short, Bluesky is doing exactly what you’d expect from a registered public benefit corporation, a business designation that extols the importance of societal betterment, not just corporate profits. Still, “It’s a private corporation,” Beaudoin said. “There’s a number of pressures that can apply to it. Shareholders could choose to sell, and billionaires could choose to buy.”

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”