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

Jack Dorsey has been again within the information recently after unveiling a pair of latest apps he labored on, and . The Block CEO put these collectively underneath the auspices of a brand new growth collective referred to as “and Different Stuff,” a nonprofit that he’s backing with a $10 million money injection , as stories.

The group plans to work on open-source tasks, together with ones that might turn out to be shopper social media apps, together with app-development instruments. The builders met on Nostr, a social networking protocol Dorsey has additionally backed financially.

The “and Different Stuff” collective goals to assist Nostr’s “transition from an experimental protocol to a extensively adopted, sustainable ecosystem by means of collaborative progress and funding.” Along with Nostr tasks, the collaborators plan to experiment with constructing instruments primarily based on the likes of ActivityPub — which powers Mastodon — and Cashu. That e-cash platform’s creator, dubbed Calle, is a part of the “and different Stuff” workforce alongside Twitter’s first worker, Evan Henshaw-Plath.

The tasks that “and Different Stuff” has labored on to date embrace voice observe app heynow, a non-public messenger app referred to as White Noise and social group +refrain. They’ve additionally created Shakespeare, which is designed to assist builders construct Nostr-based social apps with AI.

Dorsey has lengthy fostered an curiosity in open-source protocols. In 2019, throughout his second stint as Twitter CEO, the corporate that was tasked with forming an open, decentralized customary for social media. Dorsey had hoped to ultimately shift Twitter onto that protocol, however after all that did not pan out. As an alternative, Twitter spun out that venture — Bluesky — as a public profit company in 2022. Final 12 months, after leaving Bluesky’s board, Dorsey claimed that the workforce there was he made whereas operating Twitter similar to, uh, organising moderation instruments (that are, in actuality, a critically necessary side of any profitable social platform).

On an episode of Henshaw-Plath’s , Dorsey reiterated some extent he had made beforehand, that Twitter was beholden to advertisers (a difficulty that X is contending with ). “It’s laborious for one thing like [Twitter] to be an organization, as a result of you could have company incentives when it desires to be a protocol,” Dorsey mentioned. “If [Twitter] have been an open protocol, if it have been really an open venture, you could possibly construct a enterprise on high of it, and you could possibly construct a really wholesome enterprise on high of it.”

He was additionally as soon as once more essential of Bluesky’s construction, including that, “I need to push the vitality 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. That’s the place I need to push my vitality… moderately into the extra company route, even when it’s a public profit company.”