Free Our Feeds and Algorithmic Pluralism

Social Web Foundation

Today’s public square is on private property. To fight inequality, participate in democracy, and build an equitable society and economy, we must build a true public commons beyond one or two corporate-owned, profit-driven spaces.

With the open social web, the production, distribution and use of online content is being freed from the silos erected by today’s largest multinationals. But our data is still captured in AI systems that have “reached scale”– essentially the search, recommendation, and moderation algorithms that manipulate content consumption. These are monopoly technologies by their very design.

The detrimental consequences to society of this status quo are diverse and well-documented: concentration of profits and power, degraded information and media landscapes, prominence of polarizing content, disinformation and online harassment, degraded mental health, and more.

There is a broad vision for something different. We do not have to settle for how corporate spaces choose to govern, or not govern, themselves. The promise of an open social web is that we can all join communities and that online communities can be interconnected.

The Social Web Foundation focuses on the network of platforms connected via ActivityPub. We also support efforts to make other distributed social networking protocols more open and equitable. For this reason, we are excited to support the #FreeOurFeeds campaign launching today. This campaign is an opportunity to develop the capacity needed for the open social web protocols– ActivityPub along with Bluesky’s AT Protocol– to better interoperate, leveraging the entire open social ecosystem to create a working demonstration of algorithmic pluralism at scale.

We look forward to contributing to the essential work that follows from the campaign #FreeOurFeeds: Infrastructure, Innovation Ecosystem, and Governance.

Operating open and independent infrastructure services for social applications are essential but costly. Some proposed outcomes of #FreeOurFeeds are:

Independent implementations of relays, bridges and native protocol interoperability
Standardizing and testing intermediary functions like user authentication services
Personalising and streamlining data transfer and backups across all services.

The #FreeOurFeeds seed funds can support an innovation ecosystem of public-interest alternatives. Just imagine the impact of third-party recommendations and moderation systems, LLM diversity, and curation, news and information discovery.

Open social web innovation in global governance spaces supports diverse, online communities. Protocols need to remain capture-resistant and supportive of open innovation and interoperability across the open social web and an industry-wide transition to interoperable protocols and public interest digital infrastructure is needed.

#FreeOurFeeds is a public crowdfunder to realize this vision with material support, but it is also an opportunity to create a powerful public narrative, bring experts together and plot a strategy around the need for investing in algorithmic pluralism and digital public infrastructures. I’m honored to join the “custodians” who are supporting the vision for this emerging work including Nabiha Syed, Kelsey Hightower, Robin Berjon, Deepti Doshi, Marc Faddoul and Sherif Elsayed-Ali. We hope you’ll join us by signing up at freeourfeeds.com.

Evan Prodromou

@swf I'm glad to see this process get off the ground! It's great to see a group of people working to make Bluesky more open and equitable. Good luck in your work, folks!

mray

@swf …are all partners backing your ideas here – or are there still ties to Facebook? The website has my hopes up.