Jack Dorsey backs an open-source development collective with $10 million

Jack Dorsey has been back in the news lately after unveiling a pair of new apps he worked on, Bluetooth-based messenager Bitchat and UV exposure tracker Sun Day. The Block CEO put those together under the auspices of a new development collective called "and Other Stuff," a nonprofit that he is backing with a $10 million cash injection through his StartSmall foundation, as TechCrunch reports.

The group plans to work on open-source projects, including ones that could become consumer social media apps, along with app-development tools. The developers met on Nostr, a social networking protocol Dorsey has also backed financially. 

The "and Other Stuff" collective aims to support Nostr's "transition from an experimental protocol to a widely adopted, sustainable ecosystem through collaborative growth and funding." In addition to Nostr projects, the collaborators plan to experiment with building tools based on the likes of ActivityPub — which powers Mastodon — and Cashu. That e-cash platform's creator, dubbed Calle, is part of the "and other Stuff" team alongside Twitter’s first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath.

The projects that "and Other Stuff" has worked on so far include voice note app heynow, a private messenger app called White Noise and social community +chorus. They have also created Shakespeare, which is designed to help developers build Nostr-based social apps with AI.

Dorsey has long fostered an interest in open-source protocols. In 2019, during his second stint as Twitter CEO, the company set up a team that was tasked with forming an open, decentralized standard for social media. Dorsey had hoped to eventually shift Twitter onto that protocol, but of course that didn't pan out. Instead, Twitter spun out that project — Bluesky — as a public benefit corporation in 2022. Last year, after leaving Bluesky's board, Dorsey claimed that the team there was "literally repeating all the mistakes" he made while running Twitter such as, uh, setting up moderation tools (which are, in reality, a critically important aspect of any successful social platform).

On an episode of Henshaw-Plath's ">new podcast, Dorsey reiterated a point he had made previously, that Twitter was beholden to advertisers (an issue that X is contending with under Elon Musk's ownership). "It’s hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol," Dorsey said. "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."

He was also once again critical of Bluesky's structure, adding that, "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. That’s where I want to push my energy... rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation."

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