Jack Dorsey's Block Ships Buzz — an Open-Source Slack and GitHub Replacement Where Agents Are Team Members, Not Bots

TechCrunch (corroborated by Business Today, Windows News)·high signal

Block launched Buzz on July 21 as a free desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, built on the Nostr protocol with cryptographic identities and described by Dorsey as 'model-agnostic, decentralised, self-sovereign and open source,' created explicitly 'to reduce our dependency on slack and github.' Agents in Buzz hold their own identity and permission scope — they post, review code, and run approved automations as participants rather than as integrations firing into a channel. The architectural claim worth watching: if agents need durable identity and permissions, the chat product becomes an identity and authorization system, which is a different moat than Slack's network effect.