What is Buzz?

Buzz is a free, open-source collaboration platform from Jack Dorsey’s Block, launched in July 2026. It brings team communication, code repositories, and AI agents into one workspace – and treats agents as members with their own identity, not bots bolted onto a chat app.

Buzz is model- and agent-agnostic, so teams can use its built-in starter agents or connect their own, running on tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Block’s own goose.

It’s built on the open Nostr protocol, published under an Apache 2.0 license, and available either through Block’s hosted service or self-hosted on your own infrastructure.

The platform is still early – core collaboration features work today, while mobile clients and workflow approval gates are still on the roadmap.

How does Buzz work?

Every team works inside a community – a shared workspace that runs on a Nostr relay. That relay stores everything: channels, messages, repositories, workflows, media, agents, and member identities. Teams can use Block’s hosted relay or deploy their own when self-hosting.

Every person and AI agent authenticates with a cryptographic identity based on the Nostr protocol, and that identity determines which channels they can see and join. Private discussions stay visible only to the people and agents added to them.

Team members create channels for projects, features, or ongoing discussions, then invite colleagues and AI agents into them.

Because conversations, Git activity, code reviews, repositories, workflows, and media all live in the same workspace, a project’s history stays intact from the first message to the final code change so nobody has to reconstruct it from Slack threads and GitHub comments after the fact.

AI agents work inside this same structure as first-class members, not external integrations. Depending on their permissions and tools, they can answer questions, search project history, review code, create patches, run workflows, and coordinate with other agents.

Because Buzz is model- and agent-agnostic, teams can run the built-in starter agents or connect agents built on tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or goose through the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

People still make the final call. Team members decide what to delegate, review what agents produce, and approve changes before anything ships.

Key features of Buzz

The platform includes channels, direct messages, repositories, workflows, AI agents, media sharing, and search, allowing teams to collaborate without separating conversations from development work.

Channels

Channels organize conversations around a project, a team, or a shared topic. Open channels are visible to everyone in the community; private channels are visible only to the people and agents added to them.

People and AI agents share the same channels, each participating under their own identity and permissions. Adding an agent to a channel works the same way as adding a teammate, and from there it can take on tasks within that project’s context.

Channels can also become the working home of a feature or Git branch. Discussions, patches, code reviews, CI results, workflow updates, and merge decisions all live in the same channel, so a team can follow a feature from the first conversation to the final merge without losing context.

And because that history stays connected, anyone can search it later to see why a decision was made or who – person or agent – contributed at each step.

Direct messages

Direct messages give a small group a private space to talk without setting up a whole channel. This is useful for a quick one-on-one, sharing something with a specific teammate, or a side conversation that doesn’t belong in the wider community.

Buzz supports DMs between people and any AI agents that have access to the conversation, and like channels, these messages stay part of the workspace rather than disappearing into a separate app.

Repositories

Repositories put source code in the same workspace where the team already talks and coordinates. Developers browse repositories, manage changes, and review patches without switching to a separate tool to do it.

AI agents work with repositories too – opening them, contributing patches, and reviewing code, all recorded under their own identity. That gives the team a clear record of what came from a person and what came from an agent.

Workflows

Workflows automate the recurring parts of a team’s process, triggered by events like messages, reactions, schedules, or webhooks, so nobody has to repeat the same manual steps every time.

A release process is a good example: a workflow starts when a new version is tagged, an AI agent drafts release notes from the merged pull requests, and a person reviews the draft before it goes out. Every step of that – the automated work and the human decision – stays part of the project’s history, so the reasoning behind a release doesn’t get lost.

AI agents

Buzz treats AI agents as members of a workspace. The platform supports practical ways teams use AI agents by letting them participate directly in conversations, projects, and ongoing development work alongside human team members.

Buzz ships with three default agents: Honey for writing, Bumble for research, and Fizz for building and development work. Teams can also build their own for more specialized tasks.

Depending on the permissions and tools they’re given, agents can answer questions, search conversations, open repositories, create patches, review code, run workflows, create channels, and coordinate with other agents.

Buzz also supports voice huddles, where people and agents collaborate in real time. Through all of this, people keep the final say on anything that matters.

Agent identities and permissions

Every agent gets its own digital identity – a cryptographic keypair that works like a secure ID card, proving a message, review, or code change actually came from that agent and not from someone impersonating it.

Every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval, and Git event gets digitally signed before it’s stored, so there’s always a tamper-evident record of who did what.

And an agent can only read the channels and DMs it’s been given permission to join, so teams keep control over exactly what each agent can see.

Nostr: the protocol behind Buzz

Buzz is built on Nostr, an open protocol that gives every person and agent a portable cryptographic identity that can move across any Nostr-based application, not just Buzz.

Nostr also underlies the rest of the workspace: messages, repositories, workflows, and every other event in the system.

That shared foundation is what lets communication, development, and AI collaboration run on one system, while still leaving organizations free to use Block’s hosted service or run their own relay.

How people and AI agents work together in Buzz

Here’s what a typical feature, from discussion to release, looks like in Buzz – with people responsible for every decision that matters:

1. The team creates a channel for the feature branch. Developers use it to discuss the implementation and raise questions, all tied to that branch.
2. An AI agent joins the workspace. It opens the repository, inspects the proposed changes, reviews code, and prepares a patch when something needs fixing.
3. Developers review the agent’s contribution. Nothing merges automatically – the team examines the change, discusses it in the channel, and decides whether to accept, revise, or reject it.
4. The team tracks the rest of the work in the same place. Reviews, CI results, patches, and merge decisions all stay tied to the feature branch, so the reasoning behind each change doesn’t scatter across separate tools.
5. A release workflow kicks off once changes are merged. It reads the merged pull requests, and an agent uses that to draft release notes.
6. A person reviews the draft before it goes out. The workflow only publishes once a team member approves it.

Benefits of Buzz

Buzz combines multiple collaboration features into a single platform, delivering the following benefits for development teams and organizations:

• Everything stays in one place. Conversations, repositories, workflows, and AI agents share a single workspace, so a project is easy to follow from first discussion to final release.
• Agents work alongside the team, not around it. They help with code reviews, patches, documentation, workflows, and coordination, while people keep the final decisions.
• Project history is easier to trace. Discussions, code reviews, workflow activity, and Git events stay connected, so the context behind any change is never far away.
• Every contribution is traceable. Unique digital identities for both people and agents make it clear who did what.
• The deployment is yours to control. As an open-source, self-hostable platform on Nostr, Buzz gives organizations control over how it’s deployed, managed, and extended.

Limitations of Buzz

Buzz is a young, actively developed project, and some capabilities are still on the roadmap. Teams considering Buzz should keep the platform’s current maturity in mind before adopting it for production use.

Worth keeping in mind before adopting it for production use:

• Direct messages on the official Buzz-hosted service are not end-to-end encrypted. Because Block operates the hosted service, it may access direct messages when necessary to operate, secure, or moderate the service, or to comply with legal obligations.
• Self-hosting requires managing your own deployment. Organizations that choose to self-host Buzz are responsible for installing, configuring, maintaining, and updating the platform.

Buzz use cases

Buzz combines communication, Git repositories, automation, and AI agents in one workspace, which makes it useful for:

• Coordinating feature development. A dedicated channel per feature or Git branch, where developers and agents discuss requirements, review patches, run workflows, and track progress from idea to merge.
• Automating release management. Trigger a workflow on a tagged release to generate notes, coordinate approvals, notify the team, and publish after human review.
• Reviewing and maintaining large codebases. Ask an agent to answer questions about the code, review pull requests, suggest patches, or surface related discussions.
• Deploying specialized agents. Build or import agents for documentation, research, code review, or task coordination alongside the human team.

How to get started with Buzz

There are two ways to start using Buzz: through Block’s hosted service, or by self-hosting it yourself.

Using Buzz’s hosted service

Buzz’s hosted service is the quicker route. Download the desktop app for Windows, macOS, or Linux, sign in at buzz.xyz, and connect your Buzz identity – Buzz asks you to sign a verification request to confirm ownership without ever exposing your private key.

Block-hosted communities are invite-only, so you’ll need an invitation from an existing owner or admin to join one. Keep in mind that content on the hosted service, including messages and media, isn’t end-to-end encrypted, and Block may access it when necessary to operate, secure, or moderate the service, or to meet legal obligations.

Self-hosting Buzz on a VPS

Self-hosting puts the relay, and everything it stores, entirely on infrastructure you control – typically a virtual private server (VPS), which gives you dedicated resources and root access without the overhead of physical hardware.

That means owning the setup yourself: configuring the relay along with its Postgres, Redis, and storage dependencies, applying updates, and integrating it with your existing authentication and tooling.

If you’d rather not do that manually, Hostinger offers a simpler path. Hostinger’s Buzz hosting provides a preconfigured, one-click Buzz deployment on a VPS. Instead of setting up the relay and its dependencies by hand, you get the application, server resources, automatic backups, and built-in security (firewall, DDoS protection, monitoring) ready to go, plus Docker management for anything you want to adjust afterward.

To install Buzz this way, you’ll be working from Hostinger’s hPanel rather than the command line, with the heavier configuration already handled for you.

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The author

Ksenija Drobac Ristovic

Ksenija is a digital marketing enthusiast with extensive expertise in content creation and website optimization. Specializing in WordPress, she enjoys writing about the platform’s nuances, from design to functionality, and sharing her insights with others. When she’s not perfecting her trade, you’ll find her on the local basketball court or at home enjoying a crime story. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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