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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

• allthetime 3mo ago
  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.
  • gritzko 3mo ago
    I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
    • freehorse 3mo ago
      I remember when sending messages and files through IR was a standard default feature in (dump) phones two decades ago. It is a bit sad how technology in some ways regresses when certain anti-incentives apply.
      • miki123211 3mo ago
        Bitchat and IRDA solve very different problems. IRDA is 1-to-1 and basically requires both users to do nothing else but use IRDA (including being within line-of-sight of each other). For a use case like talking to a family member a few seats over on a plane, IRDA won't help you. Bitchat, at least in principle, doesn't require you to sacrifice the entirety of your phone to constantly run Bitchat in the foreground, and can work over larger distances (and with a mesh architecture which lets you reach people that you wouldn't normally be able to reach). Writing an app that has the equivalent of 2000s-era functionality is a day of work at most. You don't even need to, you can achieve similar objectives via Airdrop / hotspot names (the latter being used as a loophole to communicate across prison cells). This is not what Bitchat is.
        • freehorse 3mo ago
          I did not mean to say bitchat does the same, but that mainstream technology moved away from direct p2p, that could have evolved to sth like bitchat, to mediated modes of communication. Instead eg mainstream technology going from 1-1 IR to a p2p mesh architecture of communication (with modern bluetooth having higher range as IR etc), we got cloud, proprietary platform-specific protocols/apps etc.
          • lmz 3mo ago
            Standardizing a non proprietary chat protocol over BT would be a pretty interesting prospect. Who would advance it? Can you even get multiple parties to agree on what's in it? Is there any identity required? What's there to stop this being another "Bluejacking" vector but now with dick pics? Given all of the above the proprietary route seems inevitable, even for protocols over Bluetooth.
            • miki123211 3mo ago
              Apple (sort of) did it, with (proprietary) Airdrop, and yes, it was "Bluejacking, but with dick pics." AFAIK, they changed policy a few years ago, so that even if you set discoverability to "everybody", it changes back to "contacts only" after a few minutes.
          • Groxx 3mo ago
            Yeah, it was growing pretty rapidly during the libp2p days and tons of interesting truly-distributed things were popping up all over, but it has fallen rather far from that height. There seems to be somewhat of an upswing lately though. Federation is cool again, and many of the implementations active now seem much more stable, instead of weird half-research projects that killed themselves by ignoring the real world too much (which was sometimes true to their goals, which is fine but unfortunate).
    • dingensundso 3mo ago
      > I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011. FireChat was released in 2014. I have a vague memory of sitting in school in like 2006 or 2007 and sending messages via Bluetooth to a classmate on my Sony Ericsson K750i.
• cykros 3mo ago
  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).
  • Cider9986 3mo ago
    I could see it being a trend on social media. How to start it though.
  • londons_explore 3mo ago
    It does nest geohashes... It could do with a UI tweak though so that by default it shows you the most 'zoomed in' geohash with any activity.