I think it’s safe to say that most humans on this planet are growing, how can I put this lightly, weary of the current billionaire stewards of our social media ecosystem. X is a hateful mess. Meta is trying to become a hateful mess. TikTok is likely on its way out. Social media is just not that fun or useful anymore.
However, a cadre of celebrities and notable ex-Twitter users are trying to “save social media from billionaire capture” by creating something called FreeOurFeeds. These folks want to build a new social media ecosystem, one that is focused on the public good instead of profit-driven incentives, as reported by User Mag.
We’ve got a chance here: Bluesky’s open protocol is an incredible opportunity to reimagine social media and take it back from fickle billionaires. https://t.co/QSjbg6MAIV
Some of the big names behind this project include actor Mark Ruffalo, actor/director Alex Winter and sci-fi writer/journalist Cory Doctorow. Brian Eno is involved, as is Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia.) The plan involves building new social media apps on top of the pre-existing AT Protocol, which is a decentralized framework that Bluesky runs on. This would ostensibly give users significant control over their data, algorithms and the entire online experience.
“The last 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 an opportunity to rewrite the rules. Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web.” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Executive Director of the Future of Technology Institute.
There are a couple of major hurdles here. Bluesky is still backed by venture capital, so the team has to raise money to ensure the underlying technology is put “on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”
The foundation also requires money to start building critical infrastructure. All told, the organization hopes to raise $30 million over the next three years. There’s a GoFundMe right now, with the intent to raise an initial $4 million. Initial funds will be spent to launch a public interest foundation that will attempt to make “Bluesky’s underlying tech fully resistant to billionaire capture.”
Before you dismiss this notion as a bunch of rich celebrities holding out a donation can, let’s remember that even the wealthiest celebrity doesn’t hold a handle to the billionaires that control the levers of power. Mark Ruffalo, likely the most notable member of the group, is worth around $30 million and Alex Winter is worth $4 million.
Elon Musk is worth $416 billion and Mark Zuckerberg’s worth is creeping up on $220 billion. Musk is worth, wait for it, around 14,000 times more than Ruffalo. The difference between million and billion is pretty serious.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/celebs-and-tech-luminaries-including-mark-ruffalo-want-to-create-a-fully-open-social-media-ecosystem-174641161.html?src=rss
As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires. The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create […]
Telecommunications giant T-Mobile is boosting the signal of its digital out-of-home efforts with its acquisition Monday of DOOH technology solutions provider Vistar Media in a $600 million cash deal. While T-Mobile is primarily known as a wireless carrier, it has been building up its advertising offerings for quite some time, including its 2022 acquisition of...
Fox News announced a slew of programming changes on Monday, led by the news that Will Cain will be taking over the weekday 4 p.m. ET slot recently vacated by Neil Cavuto. (All times Eastern) Per Fox, The Will Cain Show will debut on Tuesday, Jan. 21--the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration. Cain plans...
As the commerce category evolves and expands to more verticals and use cases, the industry is seeing a proliferation of media networks. Thanks to retailers, there’s a blueprint for how data captured from the core business can power a new high-growth, high-margin revenue stream. Now, across many verticals — like travel and hospitality, rideshare, entertainment, financial services and more — data-rich enterprises searching for growth want to get in the game.
Launching and scaling a media network is a robust undertaking. These platforms leverage data in fundamentally different ways than the core business, requiring new strategic partnerships and integrations with media buying and selling technologies. Moreover, no CEO will pursue a new business line if it’s perceived to add risk to the enterprise, necessitating clear answers to questions about privacy, security and data governance.
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A huge data breach involving Gravy Analytics has appeared to expose precise location data for millions of users of popular smartphone apps like Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal, and more. Here’s what you should know about the unfolding breach.
Federal inspectors uncovered numerous food safety issues at Taylor Farms' Colorado facility, including equipment found with "large amounts of food debris."
When Mercedes revealed it at CES in 2024, it didn’t say which company’s LLM it was running on. Meanwhile, the existing MBUX Voice Assistant system that could handle about 20 commands triggered with “Hey Mercedes” now includes results provided by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, but it’s not a conversational platform. According to Mercedes, there’s a plan to roll out this upgraded system to “further models” that run the older Voice Assistant, but it didn’t specify which ones.
The new MBUX Virtual Assistant will feature four “personality traits,” including natural, predictive, personal, and empathetic. It can also ask you questions for additional clarity to get you what you need.
Google’s new AI Agent is tailor-made to automotive uses, leveraging Google Maps data to find points of interest, look up restaurant reviews for you, give you recommendations, answer follow-up questions, and more. Google says MBUX Virtual Assistant users will get access to “nearly real time” Google Maps updates. It also says it can “handle complex, multi-turn dialog.”
The agent uses Gemini and runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform, designed to help companies build out AI experiences. “This is just the beginning of how agentic capabilities can transform the automotive industry,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a press release.
8BitDo’s mobile controller offers a little more grip than others we recommend. | Image: 8BitDo
While the cradle-style Backbone One is a great mobile controller we often recommend, it’s not the right choice for everyone. Thankfully, 8BitDo’s Ultimate Mobile Gaming Controller is a cheaper alternative for Android users, one that’s available at Amazon in black for $39.99 ($10 off) for the first time. That’s well below the Backbone One’s $100 MSRP and its typical sale price of $69.99.
The 8BitDo Ultimate Mobile doesn’t connect via a USB-C or Lightning port like other mobile options. Instead, it uses Bluetooth for wireless compatibility with most smartphones running Android 9.0 or later. (Sorry, iPhone users!) That does mean you’ll need to recharge it occasionally, but 8BitDo says it only requires a 1.5-hour charge for 15 hours of gameplay. It can also accommodate any phone measuring between 100mm and 170mm in length.
In terms of hardware, 8BitDo’s mobile gamepad offers an Xbox-style button layout and ergonomics, with four face buttons, a clicky D-pad, dual bumpers, and drift-free Hall effect sticks and triggers that should be less prone to failure over time. It also features two rear buttons, a dedicated profile button, and turbo functionality, all of which are customizable with 8BitDo’s excellent Ultimate Software.
More Monday deals
If you’re looking for a massive monitor that can double as a smart TV, Samsung’s 32-inch M80D should do the trick. It’s on sale for an all-time low of $399.99 ($300 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. The newer 4K monitor supports HDR10 Plus with AI upscaling and a dialogue amplifier, and it runs Samsung’s Tizen-based OS, which lets you access video, music, and gaming apps without a separate device. It also has an integrated webcam, plus the ability to seamlessly use one keyboard and mouse between the monitor and select devices. That includes 2021 or newer Galaxy Books, and Galaxy smartphones and tablets running One UI 5.1 or later. Read our review of the 2022 model.
You can get the latest Amazon Echo in blue for $64.99 ($35 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and The Home Depot, which is only $15 more than its lowest price to date. The newest Echo is over four years old now, but it’s still a very capable smart speaker that sounds better than the fifth-gen Echo Dot. You can use it to control a wealth of compatible smart home gadgets, including both lights and smart plugs, and it can act as a range extender if you’re on an Eero mesh Wi-Fi network. It even doubles as a Zigbee hub with Matter support. Read our review.
The first-gen Logitech G Pro X Superlight is currently on sale at Amazon for $87.38 (about $73 off), which is about $6 more than the record low. The newer Superlight 2 offers USB-C charging and a higher resolution 32K optical sensor, but if you don’t have upwards of $150 to spend, the original is still a great mouse with slight concessions. Its 25K Hero sensor still offers more DPI range than most need, and you can keep your micro-USB cables buried in your tech drawer if you pair it with Logitech’s optional Powerplay wireless charging mat. The slightly ambidextrous gaming mouse doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles (not even RGB!), but it’s comfortable to push around as it weighs just 63 grams.
Microsoft is creating a new engineering group that’s focused on artificial intelligence. Led by former Meta engineering chief Jay Parikh, the new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division will combine Microsoft’s Dev Div and AI platform teams together, alongside some employees on the Office of the CTO team, to focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined his vision for this new team in an internal memo today, using a cricket reference (his favorite sport) to note that “we’re entering the next innings of this AI platform shift” in 2025 that will “reshape all application categories.” Nadella believes that every part of the application stack will be impacted by AI, and that “thirty years of change is being compressed into three years!”
To get ready for all this change, Nadella sees the need for an “AI-first app stack” inside Microsoft that will impact how its own developers use and build AI apps and tools in the future. “In this world, Azure must become the infrastructure for AI, while we build our AI platform and developer tools — spanning Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code — on top of it,” says Nadella. “In other words, our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents, and these agents will come together to change every SaaS application category, and building custom applications will be driven by software (i.e. “service as software”).”
Parikh will lead this new group as the executive vice president of CoreAI - Platform and Tools, after previously being instrumental to Meta’s engineering efforts for more than a decade. Microsoft announced Parikh’s hire in October, and this is the first major engineering shakeup since he joined the software giant. Parikh also reports directly to Nadella and is a member of Microsoft’s senior leadership team. He now has a number of other Microsoft executives reporting up to him in his new role, including AI platform chief Eric Boyd, deputy CTO of AI infrastructure Jason Taylor, head of Microsoft’s developer division Julia Liuson, and head of developer infrastructure Tim Bozarth.
Microsoft is essentially taking its entire developer division and ensuring it’s focused on AI. While there’s a mention of Azure AI Foundry, GitHub, and VS Code, Nadella doesn’t call out Visual Studio or .NET in his memo. That’s probably because the mission, as Nadella describes it, is for this new CoreAI team to now “build the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack for both our first-party and third-party customers to build and run AI apps and agents.”
After an app update rollout that can best be described as disastrous, Sonos is seeking a new CEO. The company announced today that Patrick Spence, who had been CEO for eight years, is stepping down.
In its announcement, Sonos said its board of directors and Spence "agreed" on the decision while saying it was unrelated to the company's fiscal Q1 2025 earnings, which it will report next month.
Spence joined Sonos as chief commercial officer in 2012 after leaving Blackberry. Under his tenure, Sonos branched into new categories, including portable speakers and spatial audio. But in May, Sonos issued an app update that broke basic and critical features. Sonos employees said the update was built on outdated code and infrastructure, impacting users' ability to do things like access and manage local libraries, set sleep timers, and edit song queues and playlists.
The first episode of a podcast hosted by AI replicating Sir Michael Parkinson has been released - and comedian and podcaster Jenny Eclair has branded it a "terrible, terrible idea".
Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.
Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.
Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.
Pixelfed is experiencing a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced that it would loosen its rules to allow users to call LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” amid a host of other changes that shift the company overtly to the right. Meta and Instagram have also leaned heavily into AI-generated content. Pixelfed announced earlier Monday that it is launching an iOS app later this week.
Pixelfed said Sunday it is “seeing unprecedented levels of traffic to pixelfed.social.”
Over the weekend, Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a “declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces.” The open source charter, which has been adopted by Pixelfed and can be adopted by other platforms, contains sections titled “right to privacy,” “freedom from surveillance,” “safeguards against hate speech,” “strong protections for vulnerable communities,” and “data portability and user agency.”
“Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project,” Supernault wrote on Mastodon. “Pixelfed is for the people, period.”
There’s still time to secure a FREE $50 credit ahead of the Galaxy S25 launch this month, but there are some notable deals to scope out today as well. Folks who prefer to get into the Google Pixel ecosystem are in luck, as much of the hangover holiday deals on Pixel 9 devices are now live again at Amazon including the Pixel 9 Pro Fold at $300 off. We also have the first straight up cash deal on the new 256GB Meta Quest 3S VR headset bundle, an Amazon all-time low on Chipolo’s waterproof ONE Google Find My item tracker, the return of doorbuster pricing on LG’s 55-inch 120Hz B3 4K OLED Smart TV, and more. Scope it all out down below in today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break.
At CES last week, BMW unveiled a major revamp to its iDrive infotainment system, built on the new “BMW Operating System X.” The revamp brings a new “BMW Panoramic Vision” design with infotainment that stretches around, described as “high tech meets highly intuitive operation.”
The good news is that the new iDrive system still supports Apple CarPlay. The bad news, however, is that BMW has done the bare minimum to integrate CarPlay – and it’s actually a downgrade in some ways.
While we are still tracking a chance to land some wildly low prices on the official Apple Watch braided and silicone Solo Loops, a fresh batch of Apple gear deals are now live to kick the week off. After months waiting for a solid price drop on the new iPad mini 7, today is the day. Just about every configuration, color, and storage capacity is now seeing a straight up $100 price drop with deals kicking off from $399 shipped. Apple’s AirPods 2 are still down at $180 in new condition, but Best Buy certified refurbished units have now dropped to $150 for today only alongside the return of all-time low pricing on the 2024 Alpine Loops for Apple Watch Ultra 2. All of that and more awaits down below.
