Jack Dorsey Backs An Open-source Development Collective With $10 Million

Jack Dorsey has been backmost successful nan news lately aft unveiling a brace of caller apps he worked on, Bluetooth-based messenager Bitchat and UV vulnerability locator Sun Day. The Block CEO put those together nether nan auspices of a caller improvement corporate called "and Other Stuff," a nonprofit that he is backing pinch a $10 cardinal rate injection through his StartSmall foundation, arsenic TechCrunch reports.

The group plans to activity connected open-source projects, including ones that could go user societal media apps, on pinch app-development tools. The developers met connected Nostr, a societal networking protocol Dorsey has besides backed financially.

The "and Other Stuff" corporate intends to support Nostr's "transition from an experimental protocol to a wide adopted, sustainable ecosystem done collaborative maturation and funding." In summation to Nostr projects, nan collaborators scheme to research pinch building devices based connected nan likes of ActivityPub — which powers Mastodon — and Cashu. That e-cash platform's creator, dubbed Calle, is portion of nan "and different Stuff" squad alongside Twitter’s first employee, Evan Henshaw-Plath.

The projects that "and Other Stuff" has worked connected truthful acold see sound statement app heynow, a backstage messenger app called White Noise and societal organization +chorus. They person besides created Shakespeare, which is designed to thief developers build Nostr-based societal apps pinch AI.

Dorsey has agelong fostered an liking successful open-source protocols. In 2019, during his 2nd stint arsenic Twitter CEO, nan institution set up a team that was tasked pinch forming an open, decentralized modular for societal media. Dorsey had hoped to yet displacement Twitter onto that protocol, but of people that didn't cookware out. Instead, Twitter spun retired that task — Bluesky — arsenic a nationalist use corp successful 2022. Last year, aft leaving Bluesky's board, Dorsey claimed that nan squad location was "literally repeating each nan mistakes" he made while moving Twitter specified as, uh, mounting up moderation devices (which are, successful reality, a critically important facet of immoderate successful societal platform).

On an section of Henshaw-Plath's new podcast, Dorsey reiterated a constituent he had made previously, that Twitter was beholden to advertisers (an rumor that X is contending pinch under Elon Musk's ownership). "It’s difficult for thing for illustration [Twitter] to beryllium a company, because you person firm incentives erstwhile it wants to beryllium a protocol," Dorsey said. "If [Twitter] were an unfastened protocol, if it were genuinely an unfastened project, you could build a business connected apical of it, and you could build a very patient business connected apical of it."

He was besides erstwhile again captious of Bluesky's structure, adding that, "I want to push nan power successful a different direction... which is much for illustration Bitcoin, which is wholly unfastened and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That’s what I spot successful Nostr arsenic well. That’s wherever I want to push my energy... alternatively into nan much firm direction, moreover if it is simply a nationalist use corporation."