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Project LibertyTM is leading a movement of people who want to take back control of their lives in the digital age by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.

(Not exactly media criticism, but there is no c/fediverse comm here 🤷)

Frank McCourt

In 2013, he donated $100 million to establish the McCourt School of Public Policy, the ninth school of Georgetown University. He made a second $100 million gift to Georgetown University in March 2021, for the express purpose of ensuring that “the McCourt School can open its doors more widely and build a pipeline of future public policy leaders that reflects the true diversity of our communities.”

In 2021, he founded the non-profit Project Liberty. The initiative has multiple components which includes the development of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), the founding of the McCourt Institute with founding academic partners Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris, and a network of partners within the Unfinished network

In 2023, he transitioned from CEO of McCourt Global to executive chairman and announced Shéhérazade Semsar de Boisséson, former POLITICO Europe CEO, as McCourt Global’s CEO.

In 2024, he announced plans to build a consortium to buy the US arm of TikTok.

Discovered in a lemmy.ml/c/privacy post today: Project Liberty

  • davel [he/him]@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I’m not sure what to make of DSNP yet. This is the first I’ve heard of it. It may not be trying to be federated to the extent that say ActivityPub is. https://dsnp.org/faq.html

    How is DSNP different from other decentralized social media systems like Bluesky and Mastodon?

    There are other companies creating products in the decentralized social networking space, but each of these are different from DSNP in important ways.

    Mastodon is not a social networking protocol like DSNP. Rather it is a social networking platform that exchanges data using a different social networking protocol called ActivityPub. While DSNP and ActivityPub are both decentralized social networking protocols, ActivityPub is more focused on interoperability across a federated network of servers (known as the “fediverse”) while DSNP is more focused on enabling people to directly control their identity and social graph. Also, DSNP is designed to be more user friendly in transitioning existing social media users from existing (web2) applications and services.

    Bluesky is also not a social networking protocol like DSNP. Rather, it is a social networking platform and application focused on microblogging (short text excerpts similar to Twitter’s original model). Users may not join the platform without an invitation from BlueSky or one of its users. Bluesky is an open platform that runs on the AT Protocol, a federated approach that puts more emphasis on the ability for users to host their own content, though most Bluesky users rely on the application to do this for them. Bluesky includes a number of features—such as pluggable content moderation rules—that could also be applied in principle to applications in the DSNP ecosystem.

    I’m not sure it’s even worth deeper investigation: maybe it will die on the vine.