For all those little bitches.
Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.
Ingenious name. I feel like Bitchat should be connected somehow with PenIsland.
If you want to bitch at someone, there’s an app for that
There is already a really good foss app that does exactly that, it’s called briar and is as secure and private as it gets. The downside with p2p communication apps being, that they eat your phones battery for breakfast. Still a good option for activists or journalists I think. It’s a good way to get around the “server in the middle” problem. Still more convenient to run your own (xmpp) server at home imho…
** for Android (and Windows/macOS/Linux) but not iOS.
And apparently never going to be as some key component is written in Java. Other technical obstacles should be solvable (like f.ex. getting continuous running in bg by exploiting location services like iSH can do)
Thanks, I did not realise that. So this app is for Mac to Mac communication only. If seems for briar you need to run a server still or messages will get lost between mobile users. How does this new app solve that problem? On mobile phones disconnects will happen regularly as network coverage changes and different network towers connect and disconnect when you are on the move. You might as well spin up your own xmpp server at that point, as that protocol is tried and tested for over 20 years and very lightweight and battery friendly as well…
Bitch@
I once did some programming on the Cybiko, a device from 2000 that could form a wireless mesh network with peers. The idea was that you could have a shopping mall full of teens and they’d be able to chat with each other from one end to the other by routing through the mesh. It was a neat device!
I wanted a cybiko so bad as a teen. It seemed like it would be so cool if everyone I knew bought one. Of course no one did, but I still think they are awesome.
If you’re in Bluetooth range can’t you chat with your mouths? Or is it for secretly chatting when you’re in a group of people? I don’t get the use case.
It’s not about you being in bluetooth range of the person you want to talk to, it’s about all the people sitting in between you both that pass the message along without touching the internet.
So you can be on a cargo ship, or on a remote island, with 20 other people and all use chat. If 1 person has internet, then you can all chat globally as well.
It’s the same basic method of how airtags work. Everyone with an iPhone connects to the airtag and passes data to Apple. It’s just done in the background, so users don’t ever notice.
I have no idea if this is correct. But imagine if you have a setup like Apple’s AirTag. Except when you receive a signal (message) you also relay it to whoever’s path you cross for the next X amount of time. The more people using the app the bigger the mesh network gets.
Have a look at meshtastic. Yes, you do have to get a separate device, but range on it can be several tens to hundreds of miles depending on the mesh density.
Yeah my first thought when I read the headline was “why not just use meshtastic?”
We already have Briar. I don’t get why Jack Dorsey is trying to get into the messaging space so hard. He also bankrolls SimpleX Chat if anyone is familiar with that platform
Neat idea 10 years ago “discovered” recently by a tech bro who thinks he’s the first one to think of it. He got his clicks, I guess.
No one has got it right yet though. Being apple only, he hasn’t either.
Yeah, fuck Jack.
Why?
Aside from the fact that he made twitter (which I blame in large part for how our political/news media landscape, as well as modern discourse, has become so thoughtless), left and made blue sky, then left blue sky and endorsed twitter?
The dude supports a ton of toxic shit and can get entirely fucked.
Lol he endorsed Twitter after leaving Bluesky? That’s an interesting series of events.
Yeah I think Twitter has been a net negative for society.
I’m happy to see a niche decentralized thing from Jack more than if it was another commercial start-up. And I have nothing against yet another bluetooth chat. But I’m not impressed. In the whitepaper nothing is written about spam protection, so it wouldn’t work as a reliable P2P app at scale. And the UI… It’s mere a toy for Jack’s personal nostalgia about “the good old times”. And nostalgia driven development doesn’t work in general, I would say.
Bitch At
Lmao
Where my bitchat
Smack by Bitchup
Move bitch get out the way
I read it like that first and thought it was one of these illegal apps to track your partner without them knowing.
Let’s build an app to liberate communications but only release it inside a closed garden. Great idea
In the context of the US fascist dictatorship and Apple being the dominant smartphone there, starting with Apple makes sense.
If it can be done within Apples curated monopoly, it will be technically possible on Android (probably).
I don’t trust Jack. But this does seem marginally interesting. Actually decentralized, no servers supposedly. We’ll have to see. Again I sure as hell I’m not going to trust dorsey. And he’s got it under some cringey edgelord “unlicense” license which basically appears to be MIT just with a different name. The actual concept seems intriguing. But definitely nothing to get excited about currently.
One thing I personally like more about this than about Briar - routing of messages.
It seems Briar exchanges state of the groups with the neighboring devices, they with their neighbors, and so on.
That might take a few iterations (thus delay) to propagate a message from, say, one side of the crowd to another, and leave different members with different state all the time.
While here, apparently, messages are routed further immediately. From my own toying around - not the best thing too, but initiating synchronization by sender\relay and not by recipient seems sane.
Maybe should rewrite the toy to be nicer. It seems to be closer to real world things than I thought.
And he’s got it under some cringey edgelord “unlicense” license which basically appears to be MIT just with a different name.
Bro, Public Domain.
He used different terms in different places. And to be frank, I’m not sure I’d heard about unlicense before. But upon closer look it does seem to be a the goal. Despite not being valid or applicable in a few jurisdictions.
https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html
https://opensource.org/license/unlicense
these two institutions endorse the license
From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.
