Jack Dorsey Pumps $10M Into a Nonprofit Focused on Open Source Social Media (techcrunch.com) 20
Twitter co-founder/Block CEO Jack Dorsey isn't just vibe coding new apps like Bitchat and Sun Day. He's also "invested $10 million in an effort to fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape," reports TechCrunch," funding the projects through an online collective formed in May called "andOtherStuff:
[T]he team at "andOtherStuff" is determined not to build a company but is instead operating like a "community of hackers," explains Evan Henshaw-Plath [who handles UX/onboarding and was also Twitter's first employee]. Together, they're working to create technologies that could include new consumer social apps as well as various experiments, like developer tools or libraries, that would allow others to build apps for themselves.
For instance, the team is behind an app called Shakespeare, which is like the app-building platform Lovable, but specifically for building Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance. The group is also behind heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; private messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social community +chorus, in addition to the apps Dorsey has already released. Developments in AI-based coding have made this type of experimentation possible, Henshaw-Plath points out, in the same way that technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to fuel an earlier version of the web, dubbed Web 2.0.
Related to these efforts, Henshaw-Plath sat down with Dorsey for the debut episode of his new podcast, revolution.social with @rabble... Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media because of its structure — it's funded by VCs, like other startups. Already, it has had to bow to government requests and faced moderation challenges, he points out. "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...."
Dorsey's initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments. More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
"There are things that we're not ready to talk about yet that'll be very exciting," he teases.
For instance, the team is behind an app called Shakespeare, which is like the app-building platform Lovable, but specifically for building Nostr-based social apps with AI assistance. The group is also behind heynow, a voice note app built on Nostr; Cashu wallet; private messenger White Noise; and the Nostr-based social community +chorus, in addition to the apps Dorsey has already released. Developments in AI-based coding have made this type of experimentation possible, Henshaw-Plath points out, in the same way that technologies like Ruby on Rails, Django, and JSON helped to fuel an earlier version of the web, dubbed Web 2.0.
Related to these efforts, Henshaw-Plath sat down with Dorsey for the debut episode of his new podcast, revolution.social with @rabble... Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media because of its structure — it's funded by VCs, like other startups. Already, it has had to bow to government requests and faced moderation challenges, he points out. "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...."
Dorsey's initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments. More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
"There are things that we're not ready to talk about yet that'll be very exciting," he teases.
RFC 561, 1459, 1945, 4287... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is sad that the go-to example of an open protocol has come to this.
Could join forces with New Public? Standards... (Score:4, Informative)
https://newpublic.org/ [newpublic.org]
"Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."
Their Digital Spaces Directory listing hundreds of alternative platforms (including Slashdot):
https://newpublic.org/study/33... [newpublic.org]
"As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field -- a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who's interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress."
Ultimately though, standards (open protocols, of which there are many good examples better than Bitcoin, like, say, email RFC 5322) are probably more important that implementations for distributed social media. I gave a five minute lightning talk about that for LibrePlanet 2022:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://pdfernhout.net/media/l... [pdfernhout.net]
The text of the talk in IBIS outline format is available here:
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl... [pdfernhout.net]
From there:
What are key insights for moving forward?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The power of plain text
* Simple Made Easy ( Rich Hickey https://www.infoq.com/presenta... [infoq.com] )
* A democratic government is a special case of a free/libre software community
What are current free alternatives?
* Matrix.org
* GNU social
* Mastodon
* Mattermost (can import from Slack)
* Wordpress + plugins
* Drupal + plugins
* Nextcloud
* Email with better clients and servers including using JMAP, Nylas, mailpile etc
* IRC with better clients
* Smallest Federated Wiki (Ward Cunningham)
* Citadel
* Kolab
* Diaspora
* A plain website of text files using Git
* Twirlip (my own experiments, very rough)
* Many others
What are problems with free alternatives?
* Usually more about implementations than standards
* Hard to start using
* Fragmentation of user bases with walled gardens
* Often not federated
* May not scale (like to trillions of messages)
* Design missing the big messaging picture (e.g. whether email can be used to edit wikis)
What is my guess at what the future holds for innovation in messaging?
* Free/Libre standards that unify messaging, with free implementations (a social semantic desktop?)
* Obligatory XKCD on "How Standards Proliferate": https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
* It is the social consensus issues that are hard at this point, not the technical ones
Re: (Score:3)
Moderation is the fediverses biggest issue, especially across diverse clients.
No scalable system that:
Promotes pluralism,
Enforces civility and transparency,
And resists ideological filtering without chaos.
Maybe some ideas from Kialo and Pol.is.
Re: (Score:2)
I hate this type of manager-like speak more than almost anything else on the entire planet.
Moderation is is the main challenge (Score:2)
Any sort of community based moderation is the main challenge, because of the small but critical enough mass of people who will make it their entire personality to police the speech and opinions of people in a particular discussion topic.
It's not just extreme speech, it is any opinion, fact or statistic which does not align with the person's worldview.
This could be political, religious, social, or any topic. The pro-censure persons equate any statement which does not confirm their own world view as a threat
From the left (Score:2)
There are lots of examples from right, here is one from the left.
https://journals.ala.org/index... [ala.org]
https://journals.ala.org/index... [ala.org]
“If You Ask Me” Op-Ed: Censorship from the Left - Changing Perspectives on Intellectual Freedom
Robert Holley, Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University.
- After many years of encountering censorship from conservative sources on the right, I have concerns about similar efforts from the liberal left.
- The major effect to date has been to suppress public speech as well
Re: (Score:2)
ActivityPub. It does the same thing they're trying to do, it already exists, it's an approved standard, and lots of software uses it.
From what I can tell, their reasons for creating a new protocol are more philosophical than technical. Theirs is decentralized, whereas ActivityPub is federated (you still have centralized servers, but anyone can create a server and they all talk to each other). But in practice, it's not clear there's really any advantage to that.
Then there's AT Protocol which pretends to b
Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
So he wants to create another Mastodon without mentioning Mastodon nor explaining why Mastodon wouldn't fit his "vision".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
He can implement whatever he wants as long as the backend uses ActivityPub. The Fediverse is neither opposed to new services nor to reinventing the wheel, as long as the wheels are fully compatible.
Re: Translation (Score:2)
Investor 101. (Score:2)
Twitter sucks. Jack Dorsey's 15 minutes of fame are as over as Andy Warhol is.
Taking publicly existing protocols and pretending to extend them to create something new is as Trumpian is you get.
There's no THERE here.
He used the idea of limiting conversations to 140 characters or less (as if humans turned into halfwit memory buffers at some point) to make billions. I think he’s just a tad jaded about suck-cess.
You know who’s 15 minutes of fame are just getting started this century? Mass Addiction. Ain’t fucking hard to make another Shitter app. The mildly challenging part is winning the popularity contest just long enough to cash out. Also known as Investor 101.
Hey, at least he’s only focuse
Re: Investor 101. (Score:2)
You stopped reading one sentence too soon.
Re: (Score:2)
The mildly challenging part is winning the popularity contest
Exactly why Musk paid $44B for Twitter, way easier than trying to draw in users to a new platform, that's actual hard work.
Nostr is not ActivityPub (Score:2)
We should not crap on Jack for investing in what appears to be the obvious solution to the mess we are now in, even if he is responsible for some of it.
WeShit. (Score:3)
The team at "andOtherStuff" is determined not to build a company but is instead operating like a "community of hackers”..
And I’m sure WeWork intended to build a “community of workers” too. I wonder if this haphazardly marketed bag of WeDoShitHere might suffer a similar fate when The Bobs start walking in and asking ”What would you say you do here, besides vibing?”
Re: (Score:2)
"We fucking do programming, motherfucker." - Zed A. Shaw And The Programming Motherfuckers
Sorry to report the programmer channeling Jules Winnfield , is still sitting in my who-the-fuck bit bucket.
Now I really need to know about THIS motherfucker..