We should control the algorithm. Not the other way around.

Every day, a handful of algorithms decide what billions of people read, watch and believe. And not one of those people knows how, or why, or has any say in it.

Babil is our answer: a social network where the recommendation algorithm is fully transparent, and fully yours. On Babil you can see what the algorithm infers about you, tune its weights, keep several algorithm profiles side by side and switch between them in one click. You can also turn the whole thing off, and the algorithm's code is published as free software (AGPL).

Babil also federates with the Fediverse: you can follow, and be followed by, people on Mastodon and everywhere else ActivityPub reaches.

Why we ask for donations

Babil is built by Murmures, a small worker cooperative (SCOP) based in Grenoble, France. We don't sell ads, we don't sell your data, and we don't plan to. That is precisely why we need you: donations are what keep this model possible.

Murmures itself is built around a strong social commitment: everyone in the cooperative earns the same salary, aligned with the French median wage, whatever their trade fetches on the market. The surplus from well-paid work like software goes toward raising pay in essential but undervalued work, starting with home care. Supporting Babil is also supporting that model.

Your support goes to three things:

• Keeping Babil online: servers, storage, bandwidth.
• Development: the platform and its free-software algorithm are maintained by a very small team.
• Advocacy: briefs, public consultations, talks, making the case that the right to understand and adjust the algorithms curating our public conversation should be written into law.

At our size, even a few euros a month genuinely changes what we can do.

In full transparency

Babil is run by a cooperative company, not a charity: donations are not tax-deductible, and we declare them as regular revenue. What you get in return is not a tax receipt, it's a working proof that a transparent, user-controlled algorithm is possible, and one more voice arguing it should become the rule.

The Babil team · babil.me · <babil@murmures.coop>