The workspace platform treats AI agents as full team members, but remains early-stage and untested at scale
Jack Dorsey’s payments and software company Block has launched Buzz, an open-source group chat and collaboration platform designed to put human employees and AI agents into the same workspace. Dorsey announced the launch on X on July 21, writing:
“We’re launching BUZZ! a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github. model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. 🐝”
Buzz combines channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories, and automated workflows into a single interface. Block says that Buzz is “model-agnostic,” meaning teams can plug in agents built on Claude Code, Codex, Goose, or custom-built frameworks, so organizations are not locked into any single AI provider.
Built on Nostr
Buzz is built on the Nostr protocol, a decentralized social networking infrastructure designed to provide censorship-resistant communications. Nostr—short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays—is an open protocol that allows users to communicate without relying on any central server, making it difficult for any single party to censor or shut down the network. Buzz unifies team chat, Git hosting, and workflow automation under a single identity system built on Nostr. Every participant, human or agent, gets a keypair-based cryptographic identity. Agents get a second signature tying them back to their human owner, which creates a verifiable chain of custody for anything an agent does.
Teams can self-host their own Nostr relay for full infrastructure control, or use Block’s free hosted relay. There’s a caveat though: the architecture is not truly peer-to-peer. Each deployment relies on a single authoritative relay, so “decentralized” here means you control your own instance—not that there is no central point of failure within that instance.
we’re launching BUZZ!
a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github. model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. 🐝https://t.co/8IaMVeTQNo
— jack (@jack) July 21, 2026
A New Operating Model for Human-Agent Collaboration
Lucas Isaza, a product manager at Block, expanded on the vision in a post on X, arguing that existing tools like Asana, Jira, and Linear were never optimal—they simply reflected the constraints of the software available at the time.
“When a thread in Buzz becomes the diagnosis, task, fix, and conversation of the issue it condenses what used to take different tools into one thread anyone can follow,” Isaza wrote. “It’s the entire context a user can follow to understand why a decision was made.”
He described Buzz as highly configurable: users can adjust the AI model, the tools it uses, and the rules it follows on a per-channel or per-thread basis. Agents can also operate autonomously — creating their own channels, managing their own memory, and inviting other agents — without requiring human input at every step.
“There are CLI commands for everything in Buzz, allowing agents to create their own channels, update their own memories, and take other user-level actions,” he noted.
Isaza framed the bigger challenge as organizational rather than technical:
“With so much flexibility, the bottleneck becomes the operating model. How do you orient your rhythms and processes to maximize output with the tools available?”
Open-Source Community Already Contributing
Pavlenex, an open-source developer best known for his work on BTCPay Server—the self-hosted Bitcoin payment processor—and a grantee of Block’s Bitcoin-focused subsidiary Spiral, has already been contributing to Buzz.
“I’ve been contributing to Buzz for the past week, making a few small UI/UX improvements,” he wrote on X.
“Think self-hosted Slack with Nostr underneath: anyone can create agents, choose the models powering them, including local ones, and build in channels alongside their teammates and agents,” added Pavlenex.
I’ve been contributing to Buzz for the past week, making a few small UI/UX improvements.
Think self-hosted Slack with Nostr underneath: anyone can create agents, choose the models powering them, including local ones, and build in channels alongside their teammates and agents. https://t.co/0C6MC2AupZ pic.twitter.com/zbf9YMgzNu
— Pavlenex (@pavlenex) July 21, 2026
Early adoption is not limited to contributors making code changes. Calle, the developer behind Cashu—an open-source, privacy-focused Bitcoin e-cash protocol—reported that his team has already deployed Buzz internally and ditched their previous tools entirely.
“Buzz is great! We’ve been using it internally to deploy special agents that our entire team has access to. PR review agent, infra agent, business intelligence agent, customer support agent, and more. No Slack, no Telegram, entirely sovereign, built on Nostr!” he wrote.
The involvement of respected open-source contributors from Bitcoin and adjacent ecosystems suggests Buzz is gaining early traction precisely where Block would want it—among developers who prioritize sovereignty and open protocols over convenience.
Agents as First-Class Citizens
Per Block’s blog post, agents inside Buzz can search prior discussions, open repositories, submit patches, review code, run workflows, edit shared canvases, and create channels. Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, emphasized that every organization will eventually need a space where humans and AI agents work together, stressing the critical difference between proprietary and open systems.
“Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” said Axen. “The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”
Buzz follows Block’s earlier agent work: Goose, the open-source agent framework, and BuilderBot, which handles over 200,000 operations daily and accounts for roughly 15% of Block’s production code changes.
Early Stage and Not Without Questions
Despite the ambitious framing, Block itself has been candid about Buzz’s limitations. Mobile clients are not finished, push notifications are pending, and some workflow features do not have complete execution paths yet. It is too soon for organizations that have already built collaboration systems around Slack to move immediately.
There are also broader questions about Block’s capacity to sustain a major new product. The company reported a net loss of $308.7 million in the first quarter of 2026 and said it would cut more than 4,000 jobs. Launching an ambitious open-source platform that directly competes with Slack, which is owned by Salesforce and deeply embedded in enterprise workflows, while undergoing significant restructuring is a considerable bet.
Buzz is available now as a free desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux under an Apache 2.0 license. The source code is published at github.com/block/buzz.