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Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey is not only working on new social apps like Bitchat and Sun Day, but he has also invested $10 million in funding experimental open source projects and tools that could potentially transform the social media landscape.
The online collective “andOtherStuff,” which was formed in May, includes Dorsey, Twitter’s first employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, Cashu creator “Calle,” former Truth Social engineering head Alex Gleason, and Intercom’s fourth employee Jeff Gardner. The group initially collaborated on Nostr, an open social networking protocol that has been receiving Dorsey’s attention since Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk.
The team, operating like a “community of hackers,” is focused on creating technologies such as new consumer social apps and experiments like developer tools for building apps. One of their projects is Shakespeare, an app-building platform for creating Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance. They are also behind heynow, Cashu wallet, private messenger White Noise, and the Nostr-based social community +chorus.
Developments in AI-based coding have enabled this experimentation, similar to how technologies like Ruby on Rails and Django fueled Web 2.0. Henshaw-Plath recently interviewed Dorsey on his podcast revolution.social, where they discussed Twitter’s history and Dorsey’s views on social media’s challenges and potential solutions.
Dorsey believes that Twitter should have been a protocol rather than a company, allowing for a healthier and more open business model. He funded the creation of an open protocol within Twitter, which later spun out into Bluesky. However, Dorsey acknowledges that Bluesky faces similar challenges as traditional social media due to its VC funding and structure.
“I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,” Dorsey told 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 … into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation,” Dorsey adds.
In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who have insight into how social media and tech have evolved, including journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz; former Twitter head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth; Substack co-founder Chris Best; Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine; Cory Doctorow (who coined the term “enshittification” to describe the state of much of the current web); and renowned misinformation researcher Renée DiResta.
The team at “andOtherStuff” is also working on a social media “Bill of Rights,” says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms need to provide in areas like privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance, and portability.
This, they believe, will help platforms, including Bluesky and others, remain accountable to their users despite any outside pressure.
Dorsey’s initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments.
More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
“There are things that we’re not ready to talk about yet that’ll be very exciting,” he teases.
