I first parsed this as Bitch At
I think it's intentional
They should register bitch.at, it seems to be available.
Bitchat is now on Radicle
111–120 of 155 posts
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#112Walked 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
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly why we fight back harder and do not bury our heads in the sand or anywhere else. This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
It's genuinely hard to tell if this comment is satire or not. HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
Yeah. I got a lecture here about the ethics of bypassing a past employer’s MDM.
Nevermind the fact it was possible to bypass it, or that they didn’t detect that I did so… nope, just a scolding of “You shouldn’t do such things.”
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online. Relevant discussion yesterday: > “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
What a bunch of clickbaity nonsense. Indian government*. They shut off internet access and order people to remove stuff all the time. Nobody pays any attention to them. It's still up on Github. https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
India governs more people than anyone else in the world.
So, “government” defaulting to “Indian government” is pretty sane. And relevant.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#115btw 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.
ah doesn't ham-radio packet system do something like that, I only vaguely remember
but someone would have to build it into a major 3rd party firmware like openwrt to get wide adoption
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
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.
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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#117Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#118Earlier 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.
Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerd…
People can be surprisingly resourceful when they feel like they have a need to do so.
In tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.
Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Bitchat is now on Radicle
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
All social media is censored. If you think yours isnt, you're free to test that hypothesis by posting the N word over and over. I suspect you'll find that you get censored for doing so.
[dead]
> the other side, on the other hand, was subject to "private platforms can do whatever the fuck they want" kind of moderation
taps the sign
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.