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- Hacker News
- For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.by momentmaker
- Discussed earlier on HNby miohtama
- Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.by illithid0
- > Messages route through nearby devices (max 7 hops)
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
- Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
by mkayokay - Yo where's my
- That name
Tobias Bluth vibes
by RobRivera - IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.by bad_username
- Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？by pioneerjeff
- Yes, it's in the first paragraph of https://bitchat.free/.by subscribed
- Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
by ckcheng - I first parsed this as Bitch Atby taylodl
- I think it's intentionalby inigyou
- Yeah, I was thinking that the name will be prone to scunthorping.by layer8
- I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.
- And I thought Poob already had it for you.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
by ronsor - Bitchat is an AOS (https://andotherstuff.org/#foundry-projects) project. Surprised, they didn't rehost it on ngit (https://gitworkshop.dev/), which is also an AOS project.by baron3dl
- I'm sort of surprised it's not mirrored there, but not surprised that it's main hosting isn't there. It sort of works best if people find it.
Nostr purity spirals have a great way of resulting in 5 people ever seeing what you're publishing. I love the protocol but when trying to get people using it you sort of need to put apps where they are.
by cykros - People interested in BitChat should download it just so you have it in case it gets popular or you find someone to use it with. I tested it and it's surreal to text without WiFi or cellular.by Cider9986
- Bluetooth chat apps already exist. I used a really shitty looking (but functional) one called Berkanan that I found by searching the App Store for a Bluetooth chat app to talk to friends on ryan air flights where we weren’t sitting together across Europe last year.by allthetime
- I fire it up any time I'm in a crowded area just to see. I do wish it had vicinity based chat rather than the geohashes though, which always make it hard to select which level of granularity you want (this is referring to Internet based chats rather than mesh).
Even nesting geohashes would be cool, though I think the concern is the chaos that happens when you see half a conversation but not the other (as with radio when one party is in range but the other is out). The fact is that geohashes as it is get basically down to the level of acre or so which is just a wildly precise level of granularity (though might be useful if you had a whole 12 story college dorm building all in a chat or something).
by cykros - That Radicle site design is an interesting take for a git repo platform. Good use of full width spacing, well thought out navigation, nice code rendering. I dig it.by dmix
- Yeah! Me too.by blisstonia
- I wonder if it's possible to make something like this that lets you plug in an arbitrary git repo URLby inigyou
- Walked around Fusion Festival with Bitchat running. Saw about 20 other devices and a few messages. Nobody replied to my messages. So usage isn't zero, but 20 devices out of 80000 people isn't a lot. Most hops I saw was 2, meaning there wasn't enough density to make it any meaningful distance across the festival grounds.by inigyou
- last time i was on it the only messages were hitler images drawn in ascii art. Gotta start somewhere I guessby fantasizr
- but it works?? thats actually kinda neat? i tried bringing airtags to a festival with 30k people so our group could find each other and they just shit the bed and didnt workby trueno
- That's already a lot for such a niche project.by Qision
- They have at least added mesh wifi, but yes, the adoption pick up has been fairly slow except in do or die protest scenarios.
It is handy if you're on a plane with someone but your seats are separated because you didn't want to pay an extra $50 to sit next to each other though.
by cykros - As far as I'm concerned, it was used at several protest and is currently in use in Indian CJP protests. Also Indian government made a request to take down it's repo on GitHub