Celebrities and tech stars including Mark Ruffalo want to create a completely open social media ecosystem

I think it’s safe to say that most humans on this planet are growing, how can I put this lightly, fed up with the current billionaires overseeing our social media ecosystem. X . dead . Tik Tok . Social media is not fun or useful anymore.

However, a cadre of celebrities and prominent former Twitter users are trying to “save social media from being taken over by billionaires.” . These people want to build a new social media ecosystem, one that focuses on the common good rather than profit-driven incentives. .

Some of the big names behind this project include actor Mark Ruffalo, actor/director Alex Winter, and . Brian Eno is involved, as is Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia). The plan includes building new social media applications on top of the pre-existing AT protocol, a decentralized framework that Bluesky is working on. This would ostensibly give users significant control over their data, algorithms, and entire online experience.

“The past two decades have seen the world sleepwalk into a situation where a handful of companies dictate our entire social media experience. Now, for the first time, we have a chance to rewrite the rules. Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT protocol, could provide a new path for the social web,” he said. Sherif Al-Sayed Ali, Executive Director of the Foundation .

There are some major hurdles here. Bluesky is still venture capital-backed, so the team must raise money to ensure the underlying technology is put “on an independent path, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any company or group of billionaires.”

The foundation also requires funds to start building critical infrastructure. All told, the organization hopes to raise $30 million over the next three years. There’s a GoFundMe now, . The seed money will be spent launching a public benefit corporation that will attempt to make “Bluesky’s core technology completely resistant to billionaire takeover.”

Before you dismiss this idea as a bunch of rich celebrities offering a donation box, let’s remember that even the richest celebrities can’t handle the billionaires who control the levers of power. Mark Ruffalo, who is probably the most famous member of the group, is worth around $30 million, while Alex Winter is worth $4 million.

Elon Musk’s fortune is $416 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune rises to $220 billion. Musk is worth, wait for it, about 14,000 times more than Ruffalo. The difference between a million and a billion is very serious.