Dorsey's $10 Million Gambit for a Decentralized Social Web

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block, has committed $10 million to fund 'and Other Stuff'—a nonprofit collective of veteran technologists focused on experimental open-source projects. The team includes Twitter's first employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, Cashu creator Calle, former Truth Social engineering head Alex Gleason, and Intercom's fourth employee Jeff Gardner. Their mission: create protocols and tools that challenge the corporate-dominated social media landscape by prioritizing decentralization, user sovereignty, and open innovation.

The Protocols Powering the Rebellion

At the core of this initiative are decentralized protocols designed to enable censorship-resistant communication:

  • Nostr: An open, apolitical protocol using cryptographic key pairs for identity, allowing interoperable social apps without central servers. Messages relay through a network of independent nodes, ensuring no single entity controls data flow.
  • ActivityPub: The protocol underpinning Mastodon and the Fediverse, enabling cross-platform interactions through federated servers.

"It's hard for something like Twitter to be a company because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol," Dorsey stated in a recent podcast. "If it were truly open, you could build a healthy business on top of it."

AI-Powered Developer Tools and Experimental Apps

The collective is rapidly iterating on consumer and developer-facing projects, leveraging modern tech stacks:

  • Shakespeare: An AI-assisted platform for building Nostr-based social apps, akin to Lovable. It abstracts protocol complexities, allowing developers to create custom clients with features like end-to-end encryption using minimal code.
  • heynow: Voice note messaging app built on Nostr, emphasizing ephemeral content.
  • Cashu Wallet: Implements Chaumian ecash for private, off-chain Bitcoin transactions.
  • White Noise: A privacy-focused messenger using Noise Protocol Framework for key exchange.
  • +chorus: Nostr-based community platform emphasizing user moderation.
# Simplified Nostr event structure (Python pseudocode)
import json
import hashlib
import secp256k1

def create_nostr_event(content, private_key):
    event = {
        "pubkey": derive_public_key(private_key),
        "created_at": int(time.time()),
        "kind": 1,  # Text note type
        "tags": [],
        "content": content
    }
    event_id = hashlib.sha256(json.dumps(event).encode()).hexdigest()
    event["id"] = event_id
    event["sig"] = sign_event(event_id, private_key)
    return event

Rejecting Corporate Models: Bluesky vs. Nostr Philosophy

Dorsey criticized Bluesky—which he initially funded—for replicating Twitter's flaws by adopting a venture-backed, corporate structure. He argues this inevitably leads to advertiser influence and regulatory compromises. In contrast, Nostr operates like Bitcoin: fully open-source, permissionless, and owned by no entity. This model eliminates single points of failure and aligns with the group's hacker ethos:

  • No venture capital: Funded via donations and Dorsey's seed investment.
  • Tools released under MIT/BSD licenses to encourage forks and reuse.
  • Prioritizes protocols over platforms to resist "enshittification."

Enshrining User Rights: The Social Media Bill of Rights

The collective is drafting a Social Media Bill of Rights mandating:
- Data portability: Export profiles and content across services.
- Mandatory interoperability: Protocols must support cross-app communication.
- Transparent algorithms: Open-source ranking and recommendation systems.
- Self-hostable identities: Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) controllable by users.

The Tech Stack Enabling Rapid Experimentation

Henshaw-Plath credits advancements in AI-assisted coding (similar to GitHub Copilot) with accelerating development, drawing parallels to how frameworks like Ruby on Rails fueled Web 2.0. The team uses:
- LLM-generated code for boilerplate reduction in Shakespeare.
- Lightning Network integration in Cashu for instant micropayments.
- NIPs (Nostr Implementation Possibilities) for extensible protocol upgrades.

Future projects include unannounced tools expanding decentralized compute and storage layers, positioning 'and Other Stuff' as a catalyst for rebuilding social infrastructure from first principles.

Source: TechCrunch