Tech Titan Jack Dorsey Invests $10 Million in Nonprofit Pioneering Open-Source Social Media Development

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block, has invested $10 million in a collective venture aimed at funding open source projects and developing tools that have the potential to revolutionize the social media landscape. This initiative, named “and Other Stuff,” comprises a diverse team of prominent figures in the tech industry, including Dorsey himself; Evan Henshaw-Plath, Twitter’s first employee; Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social; Jeff Gardner, an early employee at Intercom; and the creator of the e-cash platform Cashu, known as “Calle.”

The group initially convened through their collaboration on Nostr, an open and “apolitical” social networking protocol that has garnered significant attention since Twitter’s sale to Elon Musk and Dorsey’s departure from the board of Bluesky, another social media venture. However, the team intends to explore various other tools as well, such as ActivityPub, the decentralized app protocol powering Mastodon and others, in addition to Cashu.

In recent years, Dorsey has expressed criticism towards the evolution of social media platforms, stating that Twitter should never have been a company and that Bluesky seems to be repeating the same mistakes made at Twitter. In response, the team at “and Other Stuff” is committed not to create a corporation but to operate as a community of innovators, working together to develop technologies encompassing consumer social apps, experimental tools, and libraries enabling others to build their own applications.

One such application developed by the team is Shakespeare, an AI-assisted platform for building Nostr-based social apps. They are also responsible for heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; White Noise, a private messenger; and +chorus, a Nostr-based social community, in addition to the projects Dorsey has previously unveiled.

Advancements in AI-based coding have made these types of experimental endeavors feasible, according to Henshaw-Plath, much like how technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON fueled an earlier iteration of the web, known as Web 2.0.

In a recent episode of his new podcast, revolution.social with @rabble (Henshaw-Plath’s handle), Dorsey discussed Twitter’s history and his philosophies regarding social media’s shortcomings and potential solutions. The conversation took place at a hackathon in Switzerland, where Dorsey, who resides in Costa Rica, and Henshaw-Plath, based in New Zealand, convened.

During the nearly hour-long episode, Dorsey reflected on Twitter’s history and his perspectives on where social media went awry and how it can be rectified. “It took me a long time to realize this…I didn’t really put it into words until I came back as CEO the second time. But it’s hard for something like [Twitter] to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol,” Dorsey remarked, noting Twitter’s reliance on advertisers and the power they wield over the platform’s revenue.

Dorsey believes that while catering to advertisers was necessary for the business and Twitter’s stock price, it was detrimental to the internet. “They can just remove the money — your money — and your revenue goes down completely,” Dorsey pointed out. “So if [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it.”

Dorsey funded an attempt to develop an open protocol within Twitter, which eventually spun out to become Bluesky. However, he believes that Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media due to its structure—it is funded by venture capitalists, like other startups. Already, it has had to comply with government requests and face moderation issues, Dorsey notes.

“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…rather into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation.”

In future episodes of the podcast, Henshaw-Plath plans to interview notable figures with insights into the evolution of social media and tech, including journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz, former Twitter head of Trust & 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 “and Other Stuff” is also working on a social media “Bill of Rights,” which outlines essential provisions for platforms in areas such as privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance, and portability. This, they believe, will help platforms remain accountable to their users amid external pressures.

Dorsey’s initial investment has kickstarted the nonprofit, and he has contributed to some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are dedicating their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and various social media experiments. The team continues to work on additional projects but remains tight-lipped about what is yet to be revealed.