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Bitchat is now on Radicle
141–150 of 155 posts
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#142Walked 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.
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
There is no bigger measure of success for a privacy project than getting a freedom hating government to request a takedown.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#143I downloaded the Radicle desktop client yesterday, entered my new username and password and... nothing happened. Tried restarting the app and do it again, but I never got past the account creation/login screen. So my Radicle adventure ended there.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#144People 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 w…
I could see it being a trend on social media. How to start it though.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#145How is this supposed to actually work? I'm at home, there's no bluetooth device in range, can I not send a message?
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's just two recent examples (Gleam on Tangled and now Bitchat on Radicle) and they're both the same format. [Some well-liked but niche tech] switched their code forge to [a decentralized code forge]. Tbh I'm surprised how many on HN seem unfamiliar with Tangled and Radicle (and Bitchat and Gleam).
Here's some less popular posts in the past year that people didn't make Poob jokes about: * Gemini is now on Mac * OpenClaw is now on Android * Instapaper is now on Kobo * Gitzy is now on Testflight * Webpack is now on Bluesky https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
all of them have one part thats like really famous. mac, android, webpack and bluesky are all things everyone on here knows about so anyone making jokes would get laughed out as ignorant.
the only ones that dont fit in are kobo where it was explained in the title (the full name is "Instapaper is now on Rakuten Kobo e-readers"), and the testflight one is obvious because the title mentioned iOS.
bitchat, radicle, gleam and tangled are newer and came from the community based hacker side instead of the commercial one where big tech and vcs live. if your project has zero marketing budget of course there will be some people who never heard of it.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#147btw 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
“Always connected” meshes don’t scale, but fragmented meshes that use store-and-forward for some data are workable. I’d like to see someone do this with Nostr. The main issue is that you’d have to limit the size of data in transit, so rich media is probably not realistic. Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to. A mesh of meshes may also be possible in theory.
the other way is using a hybrid mesh/tree system where volunteers or paid services transfer non local traffic over static links. aka the internet we have now but with a fallback layer.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#148Earlier 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.
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).
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#150Walked 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.
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 work
I could be wrong but I think the mesh hopping only works in lost mode, did you use that?