Flubber is now on Bloopy.
Bitchat is now on Radicle
131–140 of 155 posts
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#132Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#133Walked 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.
last time i was on it the only messages were hitler images drawn in ascii art. Gotta start somewhere I guess
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
It pushed it to a place with no search-ability and significantly less users. It worked to effectively suppress the project. I say that as someone who uses Radicle and likes the project (I am hoping node search comes soon).
Are those things that have happened?
I mean, here's the first 4 URLs that show up when I Google for bitchat:
https://bitchat.free/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitchat.droid&hl=en_US
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitchat-mesh/id6748219622
It has additionally been copied over to Radicle... and that's OK, isn't it?
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#136Is this irc compatible?
Definitely! Just send a message to a given topic, it gets distributed through the mesh & users either get it or not (they are not in the mesh at the time).
Just like IRC.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
> 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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#138Walked 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.
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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#139People 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.
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).
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#140Bitchat 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.
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.