Twitter co‑founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey has committed $10 million to fund a new online collective, “and Other Stuff,” tasked with backing experimental open‑source projects that aim to reshape the social media ecosystem.
The group, which launched in May, positions itself as a “community of hackers” rather than a traditional company, and includes luminaries such as Twitter’s first employee Evan Henshaw‑Plath, Cashu creator “Calle,” former Truth Social engineering head Alex Gleason and early Intercom hire Jeff Gardner.
At the heart of the collective’s efforts is Nostr, an open, decentralised social networking protocol that Dorsey has publicly championed since stepping away from Twitter and Bluesky.
However, and Other Stuff plans to cast a wider net, experimenting with ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, and supporting developer tools and libraries that enable others to build niche social apps. Among its maiden projects are Shakespeare, an AI‑assisted, Nostr‑centric app builder; heynow, a voice‑note messenger; private chat tool White Noise; and +chorus, a social community built atop Nostr.
Dorsey, who has critiqued the evolution of mainstream social platforms and lamented that Twitter “should have never been a company,” sees and Other Stuff as a laboratory for fresh approaches to digital communication.
By channelling his investment through this collective, he and his collaborators hope to catalyse grassroots innovation, much as early frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django powered the Web 2.0 era, without the constraints of corporate hierarchy or venture‑driven mandates.
The announcement coincides with the debut of a new podcast, revolution.social with @rabble, in which Henshaw‑Plath and Dorsey discuss the philosophy and technical underpinnings of their open‑source mission.
As AI‑assisted coding lowers the barrier to entry for complex software development, and Other Stuff aims to equip developers and creators with the building blocks for a more decentralised, user‑empowered future in social media.
Dorsey’s Bitchat
Dorsey also recently unveiled Bitchat, a peer‑to‑peer messaging app that operates entirely without internet connectivity, launched in beta via Apple’s TestFlight.
Bitchat uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh networking to route end‑to‑end encrypted messages directly between devices, enabling communication in areas without Wi‑Fi or cellular service, such as during network outages, emergencies or in remote regions.
Bitchat’s decentralised design eliminates the need for central servers, phone‑number registration or persistent user accounts. Smartphones within approximately 30 metres form local clusters, relaying encrypted messages hop‑by‑hop as users move, extending the network’s reach beyond a single Bluetooth connection.
