Bluetooth range would seem to make this unreliable or useless in many areas?
A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
221–230 of 353 posts
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive. For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
> Germany always pays the bill
I dont think many people realise just how much European infrastructure Germany actually bankrolls. It is a lot.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited. When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $…
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
If you dont inherently know this fact then you should be grateful for a very lucky and priviliged life.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#224It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…
Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#225I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.
It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed lower frequency VHF/UHF channels.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#226It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…
Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#227Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations). Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate. Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. ( https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-ope…
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better. Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps: - Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow) - Store and hold encrypt…
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may…
> while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short.
Neither are real time once you introduce delayed communication. Not sure I see the distinction.
Actually, I'd argue that unreliable transport breaks the real-time assumption even without introducing delayed communication. Is there immediate feedback if your message can't reach it's destination?
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#229I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.
I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.
Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
Lora has 2.4GHz options.