Jack Dorsey has never been shy about wanting to dismantle the platforms he thinks have too much power over how people work, talk and transact. He walked away from the company he co-founded, Twitter, now known as X, in 2021 because he’d rather build for Bitcoin than run a social network he no longer believed in. Now he’s turned that same instinct on two tools nearly every tech team in Lagos, Nairobi or San Francisco can’t function without: Slack and GitHub.
On Tuesday, Dorsey’s payments company, Block, announced Buzz, a workspace app it says is built to reduce its dependence on those two platforms. It’s open source, it runs on the same decentralised protocol behind Nostr-based social apps, and it treats AI agents not as bolted-on chatbots but as accountable team members with their own digital identity. Whether that’s a genuinely useful shift for how African startups and dev teams collaborate, or just Dorsey’s latest ideological flex, is worth unpacking properly.
What Buzz actually is
Buzz is a workplace group chat platform that puts humans and their AI agents in the same conversations, positioned directly against Slack and GitHub. Dorsey described it on X as a new group chat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce dependency on Slack and GitHub, calling it model-agnostic, decentralised, self-sovereign, and open source.
The product itself combines channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories and automated workflows in a single interface. According to Block’s own description, Buzz lets users chat with teammates and specialised agents in one shared space, then move straight into planning, project management, coding, and pull requests without switching apps. The idea, in other words, is to collapse four or five separate subscriptions and tabs into one tool.
Block, which also operates Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Tidal, is behind the build, and according to reports, the company is running Buzz internally as its own first reference customer, which suggests this isn’t purely a side project.
The headline pitch is “Slack for humans and bots”, but the more interesting engineering decision is buried underneath it. Every message, reaction, workflow step, code event and approval on Buzz is stored as a cryptographically signed Nostr event. Nostr, for context, is the same open protocol underpinning decentralised social apps that resist single-server control, where every post is a signed, verifiable piece of data rather than a row in a company’s private database.
What’s notable is that human employees and AI agents are given the same identity structure: their own key pairs, channel memberships and audit trails, which lets agents function as accountable members rather than bolted-on bots. Every participant, human or agent, gets a keypair-based identity, and agents get a second signature tying them back to their human owner, creating a verifiable chain of custody for anything an agent does.
Practically, that means if an AI agent merges a pull request or approves a workflow step inside Buzz, there’s a cryptographic trail showing which human it was acting under and when. For teams increasingly nervous about AI agents making unsupervised changes to production code, that’s a meaningfully different model from “the bot did it” with no accountability chain.
Block’s Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities, framed the philosophy behind it plainly: “Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together. The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”
Still very much a work in progress
It’s worth pointing out that Buzz is still very early. According to reports, this is version 0.4.21, which by any normal software convention signals a product nowhere near maturity. The free desktop app is available for macOS, Windows and Linux, and teams can self-host and customise their own instances rather than relying on Block’s servers.
That self-hosting option matters more in African markets than it might elsewhere. Data residency and cost of foreign SaaS subscriptions are recurring headaches for startups here, and a tool that can run on a company’s own infrastructure, with no per-seat licence fee tied to a Silicon Valley billing system, is a genuinely different value proposition than Slack’s tiered pricing.
Dorsey isn’t the only one chasing this idea. Buzz enters a growing space of AI-native Slack alternatives, alongside similar projects like Centaur from Paradigm, the crypto-focused venture firm. Georgios Konstantopoulos, a partner at Paradigm, recently introduced Centaur, another open-source tool chasing the same fusion of human and agent collaboration. That two separate, well-funded crypto-native companies are independently building “Slack but for AI agents” in the same month says something about where enterprise tooling is heading, whether or not either product sticks.
The choice of a decentralised platform fits Dorsey’s pattern. He has spent the years since leaving Twitter pushing decentralisation as a near-religious project, primarily through Bitcoin. He’s called Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper “poetry”, and under his stewardship Cash App lets American users buy, sell and send Bitcoin, while Square’s point-of-sale terminals accept it over the Lightning Network. Block also shipped a Bitcoin mining rig with swappable components last year, aimed at cutting the cost of hardware repairs for miners.
Buzz slots into that same worldview. A belief that the tools people depend on daily, whether it’s money or workplace software, shouldn’t be locked inside one company’s servers. Whether decentralisation is actually the feature teams want in their group chat app, rather than just wanting Slack to be cheaper and less buggy, is the open question Buzz will have to answer as it matures beyond version 0.4.
Technext Newsletter
Get the best of Africa’s daily tech to your inbox – first thing every morning.
Join the community now!
