Let's build an app to liberate communications but only release it inside a closed garden. Great idea

Where my bitchat

Bitch At

Lmao

Bit chat

Bitch at

Being Jack Dorsey, I'm going with the latter.

messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet

So he's made a shitty version of Briar and crammed crypto into it?

Bitch@

There is already a really good foss app that does exactly that, it's called briar and is as secure and private as it gets. The downside with p2p communication apps being, that they eat your phones battery for breakfast. Still a good option for activists or journalists I think. It's a good way to get around the "server in the middle" problem. Still more convenient to run your own (xmpp) server at home imho...

If you're in Bluetooth range can't you chat with your mouths? Or is it for secretly chatting when you're in a group of people? I don't get the use case.

Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.

Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.

Yeah, fuck Jack.

I once did some programming on the Cybiko, a device from 2000 that could form a wireless mesh network with peers. The idea was that you could have a shopping mall full of teens and they'd be able to chat with each other from one end to the other by routing through the mesh. It was a neat device!

I mean...I guess thanks for the stepping off point? Android has the Briar Project, which couldn't be distributed for iOS due to Apple's license fuckery. I'm at least curious enough to look through this and see what they've done different.

I think the most useless part of this is using BT only which has a range of what...40ft?

Neat idea 10 years ago "discovered" recently by a tech bro who thinks he's the first one to think of it. He got his clicks, I guess.

don't nazis already have telegram

I wanted something like this for weddings or group camping type events for sharing photos to multiple others at once.

Have a look at meshtastic. Yes, you do have to get a separate device, but range on it can be several tens to hundreds of miles depending on the mesh density.

I'm happy to see a niche decentralized thing from Jack more than if it was another commercial start-up. And I have nothing against yet another bluetooth chat. But I'm not impressed. In the whitepaper nothing is written about spam protection, so it wouldn't work as a reliable P2P app at scale. And the UI... It's mere a toy for Jack's personal nostalgia about "the good old times". And nostalgia driven development doesn't work in general, I would say.

Really not interested in anything the guy with the terrible facial hair wants to make.

He should try a cheeseburger once in awhile.

Seems rehashed, with more enshittification likely to be baked in. Typical tech bros.

So he took a page from Apple, copied Firechat, and will offer it to users who use Apple products. Yeah, okay, nice, I’m in.

Well that's odd, on the apple App Store there is a 4 year old Social Networking app called BitChat, that appears to mostly be in Japanese. I think I'll stick with Signal.

Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.