Jack Dorsey has been again within the information these days after unveiling a pair of recent apps he labored on, Bluetooth-based messenager Bitchat and UV publicity tracker Solar Day. The Block CEO put these collectively underneath the auspices of a brand new improvement collective referred to as “and Different Stuff,” a nonprofit that he’s backing with a $10 million money injection by his StartSmall basis, as TechCrunch reviews.
The group plans to work on open-source tasks, together with ones that would turn out to be shopper social media apps, together with app-development instruments. The builders met on Nostr, a social networking protocol Dorsey has additionally backed financially.
The “and Different Stuff” collective goals to assist Nostr’s “transition from an experimental protocol to a broadly adopted, sustainable ecosystem by collaborative progress and funding.” Along with Nostr tasks, the collaborators plan to experiment with constructing instruments based mostly on the likes of ActivityPub — which powers Mastodon — and Cashu. That e-cash platform’s creator, dubbed Calle, is a part of the “and different Stuff” group alongside Twitter’s first worker, Evan Henshaw-Plath.
The tasks that “and Different Stuff” has labored on thus far embrace voice notice app heynow, a non-public messenger app referred to as White Noise and social group +refrain. They’ve additionally created Shakespeare, which is designed to assist builders construct Nostr-based social apps with AI.
Dorsey has lengthy fostered an curiosity in open-source protocols. In 2019, throughout his second stint as Twitter CEO, the corporate arrange a group that was tasked with forming an open, decentralized customary for social media. Dorsey had hoped to finally shift Twitter onto that protocol, however in fact that did not pan out. As a substitute, Twitter spun out that venture — Bluesky — as a public profit company in 2022. Final yr, after leaving Bluesky’s board, Dorsey claimed that the group there was “actually repeating all of the errors” he made whereas operating Twitter equivalent to, uh, establishing moderation instruments (that are, in actuality, a critically essential facet of any profitable social platform).
On an episode of Henshaw-Plath’s new podcast, Dorsey reiterated some extent he had made beforehand, that Twitter was beholden to advertisers (a problem that X is contending with underneath Elon Musk’s possession). “It’s arduous for one thing like [Twitter] to be an organization, as a result of you could have company incentives when it desires to be a protocol,” Dorsey mentioned. “If [Twitter] had been an open protocol, if it had been really an open venture, you could possibly construct a enterprise on high of it, and you could possibly construct a really wholesome enterprise on high of it.”
He was additionally as soon as once more important of Bluesky’s construction, including that, “I wish to push the vitality in a distinct course… which is extra like Bitcoin, which is totally open and never owned by anybody from a protocol layer. That’s what I see in Nostr as nicely. That’s the place I wish to push my vitality… slightly into the extra company course, even when it’s a public profit company.”
