Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey isn’t simply vibe-coding new social apps, like Bitchat and Solar Day, he has invested $10 million in an effort to fund experimental open supply initiatives and different instruments that might finally rework the social media panorama.
These efforts are funneled via an internet collective known as “and Other Stuff,” shaped in Might, whose workforce contains Dorsey; Twitter’s first worker, Evan Henshaw-Plath; “Calle,” creator of the e-cash platform Cashu; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Reality Social; and Jeff Gardner, the fourth worker at Intercom.
The group initially met via collaborating on Nostr, an open, “apolitical” social networking protocol that has been receiving the majority of Dorsey’s consideration since Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk and his stepping down from social community Bluesky’s board. Nevertheless, the workforce will experiment with different instruments, too, like ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the decentralized app Mastodon and others, in addition to Cashu.
In recent times, Dorsey has been extra crucial of how social media platforms have advanced, saying that Twitter ought to have by no means been an organization and that Bluesky gave the impression to be repeating the errors he and others made at Twitter.
Because of this, the workforce at “and Other Stuff” is set to not construct an organization however is as a substitute working like a “community of hackers,” explains Henshaw-Plath. Collectively, they’re working to create applied sciences that might embrace new client social apps in addition to numerous experiments, like developer instruments or libraries, that may permit others to construct apps for themselves.
As an illustration, the workforce is behind an app known as Shakespeare, which is just like the app-building platform Lovable, however particularly for constructing Nostr-based social apps with AI help.
The group can be behind heynow, a voice be aware app constructed on Nostr; Cashu pockets; personal messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social neighborhood +refrain, along with the apps Dorsey has already launched.
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Developments in AI-based coding have made this kind of experimentation doable, Henshaw-Plath factors out, in the identical method that applied sciences like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to gasoline an earlier model of the online, dubbed Net 2.0.
Associated to those efforts, Henshaw-Plath sat down with Dorsey for the debut episode of his new podcast, revolution.social with @rabble. (Henshaw-Plath’s deal with on X is @rabble.)
Since Dorsey lives in Costa Rica and Henshaw-Plath lives in New Zealand, the 2 met up at a hackathon in Switzerland for the chat. Within the almost hour-long episode, Dorsey delves into Twitter’s historical past in addition to his philosophies round the place social media went fallacious and the way it may be mounted.
“It took me a long time to realize this…I didn’t really put it into words until I came back as CEO the second time. But it’s hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol,” Dorsey says. He notes that Twitter was on the mercy of its advertisers — one thing Musk additionally faces regardless of taking Twitter, now known as X, personal. Musk has even threatened advertisers with lawsuits over advert boycotts pushed by their considerations over X’s lack of moderation and controversial feedback Musk himself has made.
Whereas Dorsey understands that catering to advertisers was appropriate for the enterprise and for Twitter’s inventory worth, it was the “wrong thing for the internet.”
“They can just remove the money — your money — and your revenue goes down completely,” Dorsey says of advertisers’ energy. “So if [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it.”
Dorsey finally funded an effort to construct an open protocol inside Twitter, which later spun out to turn into Bluesky. However Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the identical challenges as conventional social media due to its construction — it’s funded by VCs, like different startups. Already, it has needed to bow to authorities requests and confronted moderation challenges, he factors out.
“I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,” Dorsey advised Henshaw-Plath, “but the structure is what I disagree with…I want to push the energy in a different direction, which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That’s what I see in Nostr as well,” he says. “That’s where I want to push my energy…rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation,” Dorsey provides.
In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who’ve perception into how social media and tech have advanced, together with journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz, former Twitter head of Belief & Security Yoel Roth, Substack co-founder Chris Finest, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, Cory Doctorow (who coined the time period “enshittification” to explain the state of a lot of the present net), and famend misinformation researcher Renée DiResta.
The workforce at “and Other Stuff” can be engaged on a social media “Bill of Rights,” says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms want to supply in areas like privateness, safety, interoperability, transparency, id, self-governance, and portability.
This, they consider, will assist platforms, together with Bluesky and others, stay accountable to their customers regardless of any outdoors stress.
Dorsey’s preliminary funding has gotten the brand new nonprofit up and working, and he labored on a few of its preliminary iOS apps. In the meantime, others are contributing their time to construct Android variations, developer instruments, and totally different social media experiments.
Extra continues to be within the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
“There are things that we’re not ready to talk about yet that’ll be very exciting,” he teases.
