Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting

rvz

This is the correct link to the announcement from jack: https://x.com/jack/status/2079605800998146171 Website link is here: https://buzz.xyz The buzz project itself is also open source: https://github.com/block/buzz

Gecko4072

Now when I see new software projects I just think of how much of them are made with agents and the unreliability/easy abandonment that comes with it. Ten years ago this product would have been of a known quality. Not saying anything about buzz specifically.

muglug

[I work for Slack, opinions very much my own] Having agents see everything you and your colleagues see is cool. The challenge comes when you want to make certain things private to certain people. In that world you don’t want multiplayer agents leaking data, so you end up having to write and maintain complex rulesets about what specific resources agents have access to. Single-player agents, on the other hand, are much more straightforward — they act on a single user’s behalf, and then the challenge is ensuring the single-player agent cannot exfiltrate private data into a shared space unless the user specifically permits it.

jlarocco

It's crazy how one lucky break lets somebody spend the rest of their life throwing s*t at the wall to see what sticks to earn them more money.

grim_io

Marketing bullshit aside, this is just bots in chat rooms, right? Am I the crazy one?

jacobgold

Slack exists largely because IRC was insufficient. It didn't natively support channel history, search, etc. For AI agents to flourish, Slack has to either truly open its network with a protocol or eventually be replaced. I'd like to see Slack embrace an AT protocol-based chat system, which then apps like Buzz could implement. Then users could log in with domain handles like @yourname.com, and agents could use handles like @agent1.yourname.com, all under their complete control.

bensyverson

Super ambitious, but maybe that's its downfall. It's hard to imagine incrementally adopting this.

lvl155

As much as I detest Zuck, he was right about Twitter guys.

ecliptik

Google Buzz [1] along with Wave you both were too soon for this world. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

wslh

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey keeps working with Claude at https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat

toomuchtodo

Competing with https://tangled.org/ I suppose?

asdev

No one is going to churn Slack for this just because it is "Agent First". Slack is more than good enough to tag Agents and will fill in the missing pieces slowly

rsstack

> Explain Like I'm 5 > Buzz is an open-source, self-hosted workspace that combines team chat, AI agents and Git hosting using signed Nostr events, so teams can keep control of their data. Very different expectations of 5-year-olds.

colechristensen

Hey I was prototyping this exact kind of thing, there's something to be said for releasing early. The project fell to the back burner because I had VM ambitions and just didn't have enough disk space on my macbook to do VMs well. 512 GB and always full

jillesvangurp

Bots in team chat is not a bad idea. I've been experimenting with that for a few months. We started with Slack. This kind of works but dialing in the gazillion of permissions needed to end up with something that works is a bit painful. And you have to do this over and over again for each new bot. So, we started experimenting with self hosted alternatives. First we tried Matrix. It's nice but a bit too strict on end to end encryption which gets in the way if you actually want to share information with bots. So, a few weeks ago we switched to Zulip. That's pretty straightforward to setup as well. It's very easy to create bot users with both and create some automations. We did some with Openclaw and I ended up replacing those with something coded around the haystack framework, which is a bit less of a messy basket case than Openclaw. And as I discovered after I installed it, the Zulip leadership actually just got hired by Anthropic. It seems Jack Dorsey beat them to market making some announcements but I imagine that Anthropic might have very similar plans. IMHO team level use cases for agents actually make a lot of sense. Companies are run by groups of people and the larger those groups the more team overhead you get. Perfect for optimizing with AI. And if you have people doing a lot of stuff with AI, that only adds to the need for them to communicate what they are doing and coordinating with others. Doing that out in the open in some shared channel makes a lot of sense. And having some shared team guard rails also makes sense. And if you think about more complex processes with handoffs between people (and possibly some agents), a team chat is a good place to do those as well.

noodlescb

Interesting idea. I think the "multiplayer mode for AI development" bit resonates somewhat. Biggest problem is that I do think most companies have a ton of key contributors that find git/code intimidating, so part of me thinks the real answer here will be stuff like Surfboard, Town, etc. that can work with git AND the work tools in a more user friendly, browser-first way.

xnx

Excited for "decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source." Indifferent to "groupchat for agents".

alfons_foobar

Am I the only one seeing _crazy_ levels of CPU usage when opening the project's homepage ( https://buzz.xyz )? Like "maxing-out-8-cores"-crazy?

dewey

I've recently built some project that also supports Nostr ( https://getbirdfeeder.com , but more for the fun of playing with Nostr) but it feels very forced to use it for something like that. It feels like it's solving an issue that no team chat ever has. > Buzz is built around a self-hostable Nostr relay. Every message, reaction, workflow step, code event and approval is stored as a cryptographically signed event. Human employees and agents receive the same basic identity structure, including their own key pairs, channel memberships and audit trails.

dzonga

jack dope product person & person in general - but CEO skills might be lacking.