Following the emerging changes in social media behaviour, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter (now acquired by Elon Musk and rebranded as X Corp), has been more critical of the evolution of social media culture, resulting in the creation and collaborative activities of various alternatives.
Jack Dorsey and his team, including Twitter’s first employee Rabble (Evan Henshaw-Plath), “Calle,” the creator of the e-cash platform Cashu, Alex Gleason, former engineering head at Truth Social, and Jeff Gardner, the fourth employee at Intercom, established a nonprofit organization named ““and Other Stuff” in May 2025 to nurture a new online community culture.
and Other Stuff, initially created for the development of Nostr infrastructure and products, has now invested $10 million through Jack’s StartSmall Foundation and OpenSats to fund alternative open-source initiatives capable of transforming the social media landscape.
Jack Dorsey’s $10M Donation to Nostr Helps Open-Source Social Media
Jack Dorsey has been a long-time advocate for decentralized culture online, promoting transparency, collaboration, and accessibility in technology. However, the dominance of centralized giants in the milieu has forced his team to operate like a “community of hackers” or “outcast rebels.”
Nostr, the open decentralized social network launched in 2022, has received $10 million from Jack Dorsey amidst his battle with monopolistic social media giants. Nostr already has more than 43 million user IDs and around 1 million daily active users, and the donation is expected to further boost user participation.
Unlike centralized social media storage systems, Nostr relies on open storage servers that store the user data in a decentralized manner. Due to its distributed data system that doesn’t depend on a single server, it enhances the content availability, safety, and censorship resistance.
Jack Dorsey Aims for Experimental Consumer Social Apps
Jack Dorsey has recently released various unique applications, including Bitchat, a secure and private messaging protocol that doesn’t require an internet connection, and Sun Day, an app that tracks UV exposure and Vitamin D levels.
Bitchat: A Social App That Lets You Chat Without Internet
Bitchat, a peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging app, allows communication without an internet connection. It uses Bluetooth to send messages to nearby devices and connects the devices to create a chain-like decentralized mesh network. In ideal conditions, device-to-device messages can travel up to 984 feet.
The app won’t collect any personal data from users, and no user ID is required. At present, the app is launched via TestFlight on iOS as a beta version. Following some updates, it will be available on multiple platforms.
Sun Day Tracks Your Vitamin D Levels & UV Exposure
Sun Day, released on iPhone as a beta version, is a simple app that identifies and calculates the user’s sunlight and UV exposure in just one click. While the user interface is simple, it uses complex programming in the backend, including the identification of the location’s UV index, cloud cover, and details like sunrise or sunset times.
Both Sun Day and Bitchat were released within a gap of 7 days, and Jack Dorsey recently expressed in a podcast that he is building more tools and has been collaborating with various other initiatives.
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About Jack Dorsey
Born on November 19, 1976, in Missouri, Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American programmer and entrepreneur who co-founded Twitter (X) in 2006. After resigning as CEO of Twitter in 2008, he took a break from social media services and pursued Yoga, Vipassana, and fashion design.
Jack Dorsey is also the co-founder of Block, Inc., a technology company and provider of financial services. Block launched Square in 2009, a cloud-based point-of-sale system for merchants. Recently, Jack has been into open-source and decentralized milieu, creating various alternative solutions for centralized systems.
