Bitchat is now on Radicle

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.

If they care so much about availability maybe they should reconsider including libs.gms.location and be available on F-Droid (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/24907#...)

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.

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.

That name

Tobias Bluth vibes

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.

> 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?

For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.

https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773

Yo where's my

I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.

I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"

Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？

Is it Jack Dorsey who moved the repo or someone else?

This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different, some kind of centralized corpo dystopia. I’ve installed it!

I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.

In theory, this could work.

Setup machine with bluetooth receiver.

Funnel packets from Bluetooth receiver over a virtual private network (ie, wireguard, tailscale, netbird).

Then in another state/country/continent with server connected to vpn then rebroadcasts those packets over BLE.

A mesh network overlayed on top of another mesh network.

jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.

btw what's the current state of mesh wifi?

seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it

Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.

Is this bit-chat or bitch-at?

Is this irc compatible?