Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, is behind a cool new venture called “and Other Stuff.” With this project, we hope to reimagine the social media landscape based on open-source principles and decentralized protocols. The collective is composed of some very talented people. It counts Evan Henshaw-Plath, Twitter’s first employee; Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s scrollable music app co-founder Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social; Jeff Gardner, the fourth employee at Intercom.
This new endevour comes on the heels of Dorsey’s recent departure from the board of Bluesky. He was a central figure in planting the seeds of that social network. Blueprint Protocol Bluesky was originally based on an open source initiative funded by Dorsey to develop an open protocol inside Twitter. He has expressed concerns about the corporate structure of Bluesky, which he believes mirrors the challenges faced by traditional social media platforms.
Dorsey says that if social media is to be innovative, it needs to be free from the usual corporate constraints. As he explained, “It took me a long time to figure this out. It wasn’t until I came back as CEO a second time that I was finally smart enough to articulate it.” It’s hard for Twitter to be a normal company. It can’t withstand the perverse incentives of corporate actors while trying to be a protocol. He thinks social media needs to put the public interest first, not profit maximization. This audience-first perspective is vital and can inspire you to put your audience first.
In service of his commitment to this vision, as echoed by Square’s Dorsey, he has invested in several projects creating decentralized social applications. One of the most interesting of these investments has been in an app called Shakespeare, purpose built for creating Nostr-based social applications with her AI help. Dorsey’s crew at “and Other Stuff” are responsible for the creation of heynow, a voice note app based on the Nostr protocol. Besides that, they developed the Cashu wallet.
Dorsey’s involvement with Nostr reflects his dedication to developing an “apolitical” social networking protocol that promotes user autonomy and privacy. He has introduced his vision of a social media “Bill of Rights.” Such a document will provide a clear and concrete framework for important provisions including privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance and portability.
In discussing the current state of Bluesky and its structure, Dorsey remarked, “I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great… 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.” He is concerned with the corporate incentives shaping user experiences. His worries further extend to the ways traditional social media platforms can restrict access to capital.
Dorsey is right to strongly criticize corporate structures. He’s convinced that social media needs to work outside of corporate priorities. He still pushes for a more open model—one in which platforms aren’t answerable to investors or profit margins. “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,” he explained.
Additionally, Dorsey has joined up with White Noise, a private messenger with a focus on end-to-end encryption. This moves even closer to his stated mission of making communications more secure and user-friendly.