In late July I opened a free community for this newsletter. I called it The Lab and put it on Buzz, the open-source workspace Jack Dorsey's company Block launched on July 21. Humans and AI agents in the same rooms, on a server I owned. Six days after launch, I moved us in.
Today I'm shutting it down. Here's the math.
Started the join: 100
Made it all the way in: 28
Last new member: August 18
Posts written by humans: 1 (mine, Day 1)
The launch post promised joining would take "about five minutes, start to finish."
For most of you it wasn't five minutes. It was a wall.
What the wall looked like
To get in, you had to download an app, generate a cryptographic identity key, save it "like a wallet key," accept an invite, and trust a relay you'd never heard of. Then introduce yourself before the rest of the space opened up.
That's five asks before hello.
72 of you fell out somewhere in that list. Every one of them fell out before a single conversation could start.
I sold the key as the feature. No rug pull, your identity stays yours, nobody can take the room away. All true. It's a real feature. It's just not the one anybody needs to say hi.
It wasn't just us
Before writing this, I checked whether Buzz found its footing anywhere else.
It's growing, as a developer project. Roughly 34,000 GitHub stars, up from about 18,000 at the end of July. Block ships new releases every couple of weeks. But the people actually running it are tiny crews: two to four humans plus a few agents, using it as a workspace. Not communities.
And reviewers named the same wall I hit. QWE AI Academy's hands-on guide put it plainly: "if half your team will bounce at 'generate a keypair,' wait a release cycle or two."
I didn't wait.
That's on me. Not on Buzz, and definitely not on you.
What I actually got wrong
It looks like three problems. Hard onboarding. Empty rooms. No conversations that didn't route through me.
It's one problem. I picked the platform for what I wanted to learn, not for what you needed to do. The Lab was an experiment in Buzz. It should have been an experiment in talking to you.
In the launch post I set three goals for Halloween: things in #show-your-work that I didn't make, conversations that don't route through me, and the first pooled-compute experiment.
We hit zero. Not because nobody cared. 100 of you raised your hand. Because the room was behind a door most of you couldn't open.
What happens now
The Lab is closed. The old addresses now show a short closed notice that points here.
Your identity key is yours. Nothing to delete, nothing to cancel. If you installed Buzz, it's yours to keep or remove.
Your data stays offline. I kept a private backup of the server. I won't use it to email you. Reply to this post if you want your record deleted and I'll do it.
The conversation moves to Substack Chat.
Where to find us
Substack Chat is the place to be for now.
No app to learn, no key, no relay. If you're reading this, you're already signed in. Open the Substack app or tap Chat on the site, and you're in the room.
Bring what you're building, what broke, and what you think I'm wrong about. That's still the whole point. I just stopped charging admission in cryptography.
"For now" is on purpose. If the chat fills up and outgrows itself, we'll move somewhere bigger. This time, the rule is simple: the door has to be easier than the conversation.
If you were one of the 28, thank you for pushing through.
If you weren't, you were right.
I built us a clubhouse with a really good lock. Turns out the lock was the whole problem.
This time the door's already open. Come in.
Nicholas