> 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.

I'm trying to imagine a world in which this makes sense as a way to organize software development work, but coming up short. It's on a blockchain or something though, so there ya go.

https://github.com/block/buzz/blob/main/docs/assets/screensh...

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.

I love that we're challenging the status quo in chat. It feels like we've settled into an eternal September of sorts. I am somewhat bearish that Slack and Teams will survive, or rise to, the agent era.

That said, I'm curious whether NOSTR is really the protocol for this. For some really large corporations you're looking at a lot of clients (and their shadows like cellphones, local agents etc) as well as a lot of (likely) team-based agents.

The identity architecture makes sense for centrally hosted agents. Users also probably have their own personal agents as well. Do those just reuse user credentials or are they differentiated in some way? I couldn't tell.

I also am curious whether git really needs to be a dependency here. Like, maybe for Block it does, but it introduces a lot of complexity that I feel could be exported to merging VCS Host events to the Buzz event log.

I'm also curious what challenges will arise as new capabilities emerge. For instance, both Sol and Claude can now render native components in my chat window which is a massive leg up in terms of firming up a design change.

Rust is also a choice. I'm curious what alternatives the team considered and how they landed on Rust.

Why trust anything he does now ?

https://nypost.com/2022/12/24/latest-batch-of-twitter-files-...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

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.

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.

and then the first reply is someone saying that if not someone else will... and then another saying that the whole idea of business is to make money... and then another that the guy from valve is a jerk...

As a small startup I'd love to ditch Slack, as its a walled garden and both under-featured and over-complicated at the same time. GitHub has been losing my favor too.

Tangentially our startups is combining email, AI agents (chat and coding), and GitHub workflows and it feels really good.

https://housecat.com/blog/gmail-durable-workflows-sandbox-vm

It feels like a renaissance for all workspace tools, where up until recently it was mostly dev tools that got all the really fun power ups.

> 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.

I don't see a lot of information about the Git hosting aspect of the product on the website, though. Somewhat doubtful that they will be able to make a Git forge with similar polish to GitLab

It subjectively seems to me that integrating with an existing forge (e.g. Forgejo) on the API layer and rebuilding the auth and frontend is a better bet. You get stable features like PRs, permissions and CI actions out of the box and they stay synced with known formats in the community and so make your tool easy to adopt. Though making a forge from scratch does have advantages especially for internal company use cases.

Another problem I see with Buzz is that the tool doesn't seem to be taking advantage of its vertical integration inside its UX enough. There is a lot more you can do with full control over Git hosting, project context, and org-wide chat in a single tool than what this tool attempts to do right now.

There's a brief write-up on Buzz here https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz

I think this is an unclaimed space where the future of work is bound to find itself in, though I'm not yet sure how/who is gonna win.

My solo project was abandoned unfortunately, that said I saw some cool protocol initiatives similar to it recently like this one: https://github.com/h5i-dev/h5i

Though I fear this might not be well maintained or have a good foundation being so heavily agent focused but I will out of sheer ambition of a more open stack support anything that help make it a possibility.

Also the git hosting stuff seems a bit sus tbh.

Seems to be an raft.build competitor but open source.

BTW, from my very own opinion, IM is a great place for agents to chat, but not a good place for get work done. Something more comprehensive like Linear should be work better. Communication is a key stone but not all for the agents.

I wonder how they plan to make mobile work, and it's amusing going with an xyz domain given their reputation.

Indifferent to "groupchat for agents".

Like "maxing-out-8-cores"-crazy?

Website link is here: https://buzz.xyz

The buzz project itself is also open source: https://github.com/block/buzz

https://block.xyz/inside/introducing-buzz-where-humans-and-a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995706)

https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/buzz (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995199)

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

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