11 ms·

A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• jagermo 9mo ago
  I don't know. I do not like Jack Dorey's involvement. Not a big fan of his. I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/)
  • atoav 9mo ago
    If you don't like a thing and share that dislike, care to elaborate your reasoning so others can profit from it?
    • bariswheel 9mo ago
      Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.
      • littlecranky67 9mo ago
        It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
        • card_zero 9mo ago
          But the person controls the product, and the product will continue to develop, so the person's character is relevant to the quality of the product.
          • littlecranky67 9mo ago
            You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
            • card_zero 9mo ago
              I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.
              • littlecranky67 9mo ago
                It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.
                • card_zero 9mo ago
                  Yes, if the community would not be influenced by the guy, he wouldn't be influential.
            • zelphirkalt 9mo ago
              You can fork, but will you want to fork and spend time and effort, potentially in huge amounts, on that fork? There are reasons to be wary. Choosing an alternative, where that particular reason for forking might not exist, is a valid choice to make.
    • akiarie 9mo ago
      Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.
      • dncornholio 9mo ago
        Is this true? My understanding was that Twitter was not really moderated, because of Dorsey?
  • gloxkiqcza 9mo ago
    There’s no app for Apple platforms making it a lot less useful.
    • jagermo 9mo ago
      fair point, especially in the west. But looking at the market share, Android is probably the platform to build for, especially if you have an additional phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
    • prmoustache 9mo ago
      Briar has the advantage of being usable with bluetooth and internet so it makes it much more useful.
      • hardran3 9mo ago
        Bitchat also has internet based chat, in addition to bluetooth mesh.
    • maqp 9mo ago
      That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.
      • zenmac 9mo ago
        but having the bluetooth part working on iOS should not be an issue right?
      • plasticeagle 9mo ago
        This is entirely false, Apple allows the use of threads in their applications.
        • maqp 9mo ago
          Oh I found a better explanation >iOS doesn’t allow apps to fork subprocesses. While on the desktop Tor is running as a separate process, on iOS Tor is hacked to run as a thread inside the app itself. Therefore, you can’t have a system-wide Tor process like desktop and Android. If Tor is running in one app, and you open a different one, it’s not automagically going to start using Tor. https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Tor-app-for-iPad-and-iPhone/answer/Kamran-Khan-92 https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Tor-app-for-iPad-...
  • PatronBernard 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • goodpoint 9mo ago
    Also why reinventing the wheel? There is already Briar.
  • keepamovin 9mo ago
    I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim. Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.
  • trueno 9mo ago
    I personally don't care if its bitchat or briar, I care about the most effective proven implementation in the end. Such a technology is needed now, not later, and if if bitchat started out as dorseys vibe coded side project last year and has now grown into something greater, then so be it.
  • olejorgenb 9mo ago
    There's also Berty https://berty.tech/features/ https://berty.tech/features/
• mikecamara 9mo ago
  What happened to that fire chat app that did the same thing back in 2014 or something?
  • Kina 9mo ago
    I remember distinctly that the developers said they were working on a next generation version of it and it just never happened. I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.
• budududuroiu 9mo ago
  Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
  • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited. When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate. Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.) Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world. [1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/
    • niemandhier 9mo ago
      Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive. For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
      • nunobrito 9mo ago
        For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
        • alt227 9mo ago
• maqp 9mo ago
  Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.
  • melting_snow 9mo ago
    I see two use cases: * Communication between protestors * Illegal activities, but here I can imagine that bluetooth range is too small
    • reddalo 9mo ago
      I remember when Telegram had a "Nearby" feature. I remember seeing many not-so-legal activities around me, even in the range of 1 km.
    • thijson 9mo ago
      I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
    • catlifeonmars 9mo ago
      > Communication between protestors > Illegal activities Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
    • 3RTB297 9mo ago
      The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly: Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc. Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other. 300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
• reconnecting 9mo ago
  Here are original posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146
• nicois 9mo ago
  One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage. You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
  • trueno 9mo ago
    that is a super good callout. this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time. but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage." i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.
    • throwaway82113 9mo ago
      Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
      • n4r9 9mo ago
        > The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations If I understand correctly, this would still be true if the recipient is connected.
• j1elo 9mo ago
  This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2]) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
  • budududuroiu 9mo ago
    Not sure about bitchat, but Briar is being used in Iran right now. https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdowns-cut-85m-off/ https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdo... Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
    • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
      > Briar is being used in Iran right now Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
      • budududuroiu 9mo ago
        Good call, I'd also like to know if this is actually true
  • throwaway758439 9mo ago
    Living under the rock of meaningless political theater is not great [1] [1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
• kbouck 9mo ago
  Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space
• j1elo 9mo ago
  What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane) * I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good. * Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal. Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
  • fc417fc802 9mo ago
    Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.
• boozelclark 9mo ago
  This is an interesting enhancement using Meshtastic to expand the range of bitchat https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542 https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542
  • cedws 9mo ago
    My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
    • mytailorisrich 9mo ago
      I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
      • snovv_crash 9mo ago
        Lora has 2.4GHz options.
    • Y_Y 9mo ago
      Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones. Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these. It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time. edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
• lazzlazzlazz 9mo ago
  Every time I've logged into Bitchat, nobody appears to be online - across the entire United States.
  • jaldert 9mo ago
    Same in Iceland, but even when traveling across the world, I never see anyone when trying it.
• simonmales 9mo ago
  It's getting movement in tough political environments like Uganda: https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-pre-election-internet-shutdown/ https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-p... And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becomes-jamaica-s-go-to-app-as-hurricane-melissa-cripples-communication-crypto-news-cryptocurrency-9546453 https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
  • hexagonwin 9mo ago
    > Its soaring popularity highlights how decentralised technology can offer a vital communication lifeline during natural disasters. Its soaring popularity demonstrates how decentralised tools can provide a critical communication lifeline when natural disasters knock out traditional infrastructure. seems like the second article is written by AI
• canterburry 9mo ago
  Finally...a dedicated app to bitch at people.
  • szszrk 9mo ago
    Now I cannot unsee it... A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.
    • askvictor 9mo ago
      A bit like expert sex change.
  • pipo234 9mo ago
    OMG you're right. I cannot unsee..
• sgt 9mo ago
  Thought this could have been used in Iran but I guess it was a bit immature still.
  • throwaway758439 9mo ago
    [dead]
• maelito 9mo ago
  Does not work without Google Play services. No-go.
• senchalover23 9mo ago
  bithcat is out for like.. a long time. Why is hyping now?
• senchalover23 9mo ago
  Bitchat is out for a while now, why is hyoping now?
• anidsiam 9mo ago
  Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?
  • Kina 9mo ago
    I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”. Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
• pbiggar 9mo ago
  We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messaging-without-internet/ https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
• kkfx 9mo ago
  My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it. We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled. So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them. If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose. We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.
• throwaway758439 9mo ago
  [dead]
• rm30 9mo ago
  I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications. The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect. In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices. Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).
• kelseydh 9mo ago
  I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.
• consoleable 9mo ago
  Hopefully, the browser Bluetooth API will receive more support (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetooth_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...). Web-based PWAs are more suitable because apps are subject to app store censorship.
  • curtisblaine 9mo ago
    Can PWAs run (and interact with Bluetooth) in the background? Edit: no they can't, so PWA would be not very useful at this.
    • twism 9mo ago
      Could still work in some cases where a certain amount of users are in and out of the website and in proximity e.g. protests
      • ninalanyon 9mo ago
        Doesn't help if internet is down.
        • twism 9mo ago
          web apps can work offline
• nubinetwork 9mo ago
  Considering that my Bluetooth headset disconnects when I even think about looking at my microwave, I can't trust Bluetooth any further than 10 feet... If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.
• ddtaylor 9mo ago
  I am using Briar and Session right now for this. Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.
• Angostura 9mo ago
  I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi
• Philip-J-Fry 9mo ago
  This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones. Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones. Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet. I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.
  • spockz 9mo ago
    Wouldn’t that bring the wrath of mobile carriers around the world on their back? If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?
    • engineer_22 9mo ago
      > what is left to monetise? Low latency, high bandwidth
    • mikehotel 9mo ago
      Apple/Google have the financial brawn to push a disrupting technology into more common use. And this is not encumbered by any restrictive licenses.
      • alt227 9mo ago
        It really isnt a disrupting technoology. It doesnt work as soon as you are far away from any other humans with phones.
    • api 9mo ago
      Range? Bandwidth? A solution like that would work only in limited circumstances. It’d be neat but no replacement for cellular.
      • spockz 9mo ago
• dim13 9mo ago
  Finally I see some people around. Was pretty lonely, as it launched.
• Tooster 9mo ago
  Cap your html bodies to 75ch width for comfortable reading. Minimalism doesn't conflict with nice layout and it's 1 line of css.
• russnes 9mo ago
  Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot
  • erlend_sh 9mo ago
    Bluetooth works most reliably across all devices (within its limited range), but all these p2p apps are indeed moving towards multi-transport support to diversify and widen the connectivity grid: https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware
• russnes 9mo ago
  Has Signal ever considered implementing any sort of peer to peer message propagation?
• StephenMelon 9mo ago
  The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.
• brk 9mo ago
  It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions. Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
• rm30 9mo ago
  The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also. I'll tell you a story. Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah. This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment. A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone. And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.
  • deknos 9mo ago
    but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
    • rm30 9mo ago
      To have an FM receiver work on a phone, you do need an antenna, the wired headphones serve that purpose perfectly. An FM transmitter is easy to find; you can use the simple 'Jack-to-FM' adapters designed for car radios, or much better, a USB SDR (which can range from a few kHz to GHz). Regarding the 'protocol for the waves,' you'll need to play with modulation. That’s the fun part. In technical literature, there are many well-defined modulations (like AFSK or FSK) with clear suggested applications for low-SNR environments. As for Android support, I have no idea. I understand that in this thread, 'free' sounds like 'freedom,' but freedom has a cost. The freedom of communication requires investment: in hardware, software, and the time to learn the physics of the environment.
      • deknos 9mo ago
        hm, than i think it's better to use the LORA stuff, no? if i need an external device with my device anyway, i can use one of them. because the fun thing is cool, but people want some usable...
• deknos 9mo ago
  is there an actual real good comparison of bitchat vs. briar from all sides? protocols, cryptography, supplychain, which software stack, usability and so on?
• JulianHart 9mo ago
  This would've been useful during the Iran shutdowns last week. Bluetooth mesh is one of the few things that keeps working when carriers go dark.
  • dominicrose 9mo ago
    The regime in Iran has so much to hide it's unlikely that they will enable unsupervised international communication ever again. Other countries don't seem ready to do anything about it.
• Kapura 9mo ago
  choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding." how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?
  • coffeebeqn 9mo ago
    What else would they use? This is for when your government has turned off all sensible networks.
  • fnands 9mo ago
    Funny, but I think you're missing the point here. This is not meant to be an efficient, every day messaging platform. It's for people who are afraid of the government turning off the internet/cell network (kinda justified if you live in Iran or Uganda), or those networks going offline due to natural disasters (see Jamaica)
• atwrk 9mo ago
  Pronouncing this out loud I wonder whether the name has been chosen on purpose for the marketing effect: "Where's my bitchat"
• devin-2030 9mo ago
  Headline made me think of FidoNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
• alecco 9mo ago
  Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
  • NoiseBert69 9mo ago
    Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations). Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate. Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
    • soldeace 9mo ago
      Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
      • NoiseBert69 9mo ago
        We are not seeing a correlation between channel saturation and/or alien non-related stations. IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.
    • alecco 9mo ago
      Sounds good. But there are ~10x fewer nodes in my area :(
      • ninalanyon 9mo ago
• ifh-hn 9mo ago
  It doesn't matter how hard I try to see: bit-chat, my brain defaults to: bitch-at, and if I scan it: bitch-hat.
• modeless 9mo ago
  It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. This is a choice our governments have made, not something inherent to the technology.
  • bilsbie 9mo ago
    Ham frequencies would work even better?
  • digiown 9mo ago
    Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
    • modeless 9mo ago
      Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.
      • kanbankaren 9mo ago
        It is not as easy as you think. RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high. Also, the distance over which one could communicate depends on antenna height, so if both parties are at ground level, it is not feasible over a few hundred meters unless both are in wide open space. Source: ham operator who has played with long distance device to device communication without using a repeater.
• elzbardico 9mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.
  • modeless 9mo ago
    It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed lower frequency VHF/UHF channels.
  • digiown 9mo ago
    I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.
• prathje 9mo ago
  There are a lot of old and new mobile applications doing this. If there is anyone doing some research in this space, maybe take a look at our "DisruptaBLE" implementation for delay tolerant networking on embedded devices: https://openreview.net/forum?id=xy3Y6cLOV2 https://openreview.net/forum?id=xy3Y6cLOV2
• duxup 9mo ago
  Bluetooth range would seem to make this unreliable or useless in many areas?
• zhyder 9mo ago
  Love it. Wonder if it's viable for citizen journalism in warzones and areas of civil unrest, with the larger size of photos (and short videos), given the inherently slow transfer rates and battery life implications of going thru multiple hops before Internet-exiting the area that's otherwise Internet-offline. What's the back-of-the-envelope math here on viable bandwidth? Wifi obviously has higher bandwidth, but I guess it isn't viable as a mesh, or is there any trick with turning on/off hotspots on phones dynamically that'd make it viable? (Afaik older phones made you pick between being a hotspot or being a regular wifi client, but at least some newer ones seem to allow both simultaneously.) I'm definitely hoping for a future with wider support for C2PA (content credentials on images) on phone cameras to make these photos power citizen journalism. So far Samsung S25 and Pixel 10 support C2PA in the camera hardware: need other phone makers (especially Apple) to get on board already... if you're an iPhone user, please help yell at Apple support etc! Aside: I registered a domain and plan to build a citizen journalism news feed for such photos (and uncut videos). I see it as the antidote to Instagram et al's feeds that're full of AI slop (and plenty of fakery even before AI-generated imagery got big). And it's essential to truth, democracy and ultimately (maybe I'm too idealistic here) peace. Aside to the aside: wish some of us techies banded together to build "peace tech" as a new sector in tech, DM if interested in brainstorming or working together.
• thoughtpalette 9mo ago
  Bring back Cybiko's, we can message there instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
  • johntash 9mo ago
    Oh man, I remember these. A modern version would be pretty cool.
• bilsbie 9mo ago
  I open bitchat once a week. Someday I’ll find someone nearby and we’ll be best friends.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• gethly 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• ENadyr 9mo ago
  Whatever happened to VolkFi? A YC company that was making a decentralized phone, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437963
• dejongh 9mo ago
  Let's all install this and form a fail-safe (if you are in a populated area) and unregulated mesh. I would love to see how far into the Amazonas or Greenland it works.
• ninalanyon 9mo ago
  Without store and forward you will rarely be able to get messages out of the local area.
• WhyNotHugo 9mo ago
  Isn’t this similar to Brair? AFAIK, Brair relays messages through Bluetooth but also through Tor if possible.
• 31337Logic 9mo ago
  I love Briar for this use-case.
• jadbox 9mo ago
  What about a desktop web app? Using web standards, you can access bluetooth now (to some degree).
• h4kunamata 9mo ago
  Reading some comments, people do not understand..... Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally. Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything. If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons. It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent. That tells you a lot.
• tmvnty 9mo ago
  Someone build a commercial wrapper around this, and sell it at (huge) music festivals as alternative message tools???
• freakynit 9mo ago
  All comments analyzed by LLM: https://hn-discussions.top/bitchat-bluetooth-p2p-messaging/ https://hn-discussions.top/bitchat-bluetooth-p2p-messaging/