Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey isn’t just vibe-coding new social apps, like Bitchat and Sun Day, he has invested $10 million in an effort to fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape.
These efforts are funneled through an online collective called “and Other Stuff,” formed in May, whose team includes Dorsey; Twitter’s first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath; “Calle,” creator of the e-cash platform Cashu; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social; and Jeff Gardner, the fourth employee at Intercom.
Image Credits:and Other Stuff
The group originally met through collaborating on Nostr, an open, “apolitical” social networking protocol that has been receiving the bulk of Dorsey’s attention since Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk and his stepping down from social network Bluesky’s board. However, the team will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the decentralized app Mastodon and others, as well as Cashu.
Image Credits:Cashu
In recent years, Dorsey has been more critical of how social media platforms have evolved, saying that Twitter should have never been a company and that Bluesky seemed to be repeating the mistakes he and others made at Twitter.
As a result, the team at “and Other Stuff” is determined not to build a company but is instead operating like a “community of hackers,” explains Henshaw-Plath. Together, they’re working to create technologies that could include new consumer social apps as well as various experiments, like developer tools or libraries, that would allow others to build apps for themselves.
For instance, the team is behind an app called Shakespeare, which is like the app-building platform Lovable, but specifically for building Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance.
Image Credits:shakespeare
The group is also behind heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; private messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social community +chorus, in addition to the apps Dorsey has already released.
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