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 by a web-based collective referred to as “and Different Stuff,” shaped in Might, whose staff contains Dorsey; Twitter’s first worker, Evan Henshaw-Plath; “Calle,” creator of the e-cash platform Cashu; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Fact Social; and Jeff Gardner, the fourth worker at Intercom.
Picture Credit:and Different Stuff
The group initially met by 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 staff will experiment with different instruments, too, like ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the decentralized app Mastodon and others, in addition to Cashu.
Picture Credit:Cashu
Lately, Dorsey has been extra important of how social media platforms have developed, 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.
Consequently, the staff at “and Different Stuff” is decided to not construct an organization however is as an alternative working like a “group of hackers,” explains Henshaw-Plath. Collectively, they’re working to create applied sciences that might embrace new client social apps in addition to varied experiments, like developer instruments or libraries, that will permit others to construct apps for themselves.
For example, the staff is behind an app referred to as Shakespeare, which is just like the app-building platform Lovable, however particularly for constructing Nostr-based social apps with AI help.
Picture Credit:shakespeare
The group can be behind heynow, a voice word app constructed on Nostr; Cashu pockets; non-public messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social group +refrain, along with the apps Dorsey has already launched.
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Developments in AI-based coding have made such a experimentation doable, Henshaw-Plath factors out, in the identical manner that applied sciences like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to gasoline an earlier model of the online, dubbed Internet 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 incorrect and the way it may be fastened.
“It took me a very long time to appreciate this…I didn’t actually put it into phrases till I got here again as CEO the second time. Nevertheless it’s onerous for one thing like [Twitter] to be an organization, as a result of you might have company incentives when it desires 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 referred to as X, non-public. 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 value, it was the “incorrect factor for the web.”
“They will simply take away the cash — your cash — and your income goes down fully,” Dorsey says of advertisers’ energy. “So if [Twitter] have been an open protocol, if it have been actually an open challenge, you would construct a enterprise on prime of it, and you would construct a really wholesome enterprise on prime of it.”
Dorsey finally funded an effort to construct an open protocol inside Twitter, which later spun out to turn out to be 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 believe [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is nice. I believe the staff is nice,” Dorsey advised Henshaw-Plath, “however the construction is what I disagree with…I need to push the power in a distinct route, 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 properly,” he says. “That’s the place I need to push my power…reasonably into the extra company route, even when it’s a public profit company,” Dorsey provides.
Picture Credit:and Different Stuff (opens in a brand new window)
In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who’ve perception into how social media and tech have developed, 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 internet), and famend misinformation researcher Renée DiResta.
The staff at “and Different Stuff” can be engaged on a social media “Invoice of Rights,” says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms want to offer 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 exterior strain.
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 remains to be within the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
“There are issues that we’re not prepared to speak about but that’ll be very thrilling,” he teases.
