Walked 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.
NeOchenHorosho 22 minutes ago [-]
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
People 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.
allthetime 4 hours ago [-]
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.
gritzko 3 hours ago [-]
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
freehorse 2 hours ago [-]
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.
miki123211 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
freehorse 6 minutes ago [-]
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 mesh architecture of communication, we got cloud, proprietary platform-specific protocols/apps etc.
dmix 5 hours ago [-]
That Radicle site design is an interesting take for a git repo platform. Good use of full width spacing, well thought out navigation, nice code rendering. I dig it.
inigyou 44 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if it's possible to make something like this that lets you plug in an arbitrary git repo URL
blisstonia 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah! Me too.
RobRivera 3 hours ago [-]
That name
Tobias Bluth vibes
bad_username 3 hours ago [-]
IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.
inigyou 42 minutes ago [-]
I will make sure to ask everyone this the next time I visit a decentralisation workshop
Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.
nfbdhdfbf 3 hours ago [-]
It definitely won’t.
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
qphe95 3 hours ago [-]
Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
mastax 3 hours ago [-]
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 nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.
miki123211 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
freehorse 2 hours ago [-]
I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
qphe95 2 hours ago [-]
We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
freehorse 2 hours ago [-]
Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
miohtama 2 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 41 minutes ago [-]
It's also called news dot hypercapitalist VC fund dot com
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
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.
trollbridge 20 minutes ago [-]
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.”
ranger_danger 3 hours ago [-]
When people talk about the Streisand Effect, they usually refer to content that someone wants to disappear entirely, not merely lower its usage.
In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.
We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.
> Messages route through nearby devices (max 7 hops)
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
mkayokay 3 hours ago [-]
Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).
I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.
ronsor 4 hours ago [-]
And I thought Poob already had it for you.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
For people who know what Bitchat and Radicle and GitHub and India are, though, and saw the Indian government threatened GitHub to remove Bitchat, this is news.
taylodl 54 minutes ago [-]
I first parsed this as Bitch At
layer8 45 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I was thinking that the name will be prone to scunthorping.
inigyou 45 minutes ago [-]
I think it's intentional
layer8 41 minutes ago [-]
They should register bitch.at, it seems to be available.
inigyou 14 minutes ago [-]
not sure about .at but DACH countries tend to require KYC everything and a bunch of bureaucracy if you offer encryption as a service
pioneerjeff 6 hours ago [-]
Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？
ckcheng 6 hours ago [-]
Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"
TaupeRanger 4 hours ago [-]
And at least one comment references "Curtains for Zoosha"
culi 3 hours ago [-]
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).
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
Radicle and Bitchat have been covered here quite a few times. These drive-by commenters (all making the same joke) come every time, and they think they’re being clever by discouraging people from looking into the product.
Note that you’ll never hear people saying “what’s a Google” (an equally ridiculous name) or jumping on some random YC startup with a silly name. It’s always the open source tech. It’s not random!
Joke’s on them anyway, I believe many users have embraced the alternate interpretation of the name. There’s a @BitchatMe_ Twitter account that covers BitChat news, for example. They’re just being annoying without any real effect.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
Here's some less popular posts in the past year that people didn't make Poob jokes about:
This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different, some kind of centralized corpo dystopia. I’ve installed it!
imtringued 5 hours ago [-]
I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.
2color 3 hours ago [-]
Radicle contributor here.
It's the same project. radicle.dev is for the protocol,
radicle.network is for the network explorer.
It sounds like both are the same project, one is the “explorer” which is on a different domain so that censoring it doesn’t impact the main site
IshKebab 5 hours ago [-]
I think radicle.dev is the software that lets you store issues and PRs inside a Git repo, and radicle.network is some kind of interface to people's hosts that run the Radicle software. Something like that?
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
the main reason they mentioned [1] for radicle.network is because their old domain radicle.xyz was blocked in some places by some lists that they think was because it may have hosted certain UGC that triggered some flags.
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
What if you disagree with the centralisation of the internet into some guy's suffix list?
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
> deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
So it would be a lot clearer (read: not completely unclear), if radicle.network actually said "Radicle Explorer" somewhere. "Radicle Explorer" is a great descriptive name which instantly conveys a lot of information about what it is and does! But it doesn't appear anywhere there.
ckcheng 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think it’s like a decentralized GitHub?
5 hours ago [-]
xyst 4 hours ago [-]
In theory, this could work.
Setup machine with bluetooth receiver.
Funnel packets from Bluetooth receiver over a virtual private network (ie, wireguard, tailscale, netbird).
Then in another state/country/continent with server connected to vpn then rebroadcasts those packets over BLE.
A mesh network overlayed on top of another mesh network.
ck2 5 hours ago [-]
btw 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
iamnothere 2 hours ago [-]
“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.
ck2 18 minutes ago [-]
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
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Mesh networks don't scale beyond a few thousand nodes if the nodes move frequently. Nobody has found a way to make that work. You can push another order of magnitude if you give up on decentralisation.
guess_who_is_it 5 hours ago [-]
jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
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.
vitalyan8184 2 hours ago [-]
in case of old twitter, the blue checkmarks and their likeminded folx were allowed to hatespeak, "brigade", doxx, libel, call to violence, anything at all, as long as their infinite vitriol was directed at certain groups implicitly but blatantly designated as unprotected. the other side, on the other hand, was subject to "private platforms can do whatever the fuck they want" kind of moderation, where even "off-platform conduct" could get you summarily banned.
bigyabai 4 hours ago [-]
Dorsey's legacy is promoting cryptocurrency. Censorship is part-and-parcel with owning any social media.
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
VCFundedGenYer 5 hours ago [-]
Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.
khimaros 2 hours ago [-]
i have this pet theory that it was inspired by BitchX (they prominently mention being like IRC)
culi 5 hours ago [-]
Probably on purpose. Like "Broken, But Whole"
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the title of a video game, because it's South Park and they do that sort of thing.
culi 3 hours ago [-]
Ah yeah, that was the name. Thanks
logicchains 5 hours ago [-]
It could be deliberate. Like Wechat's Chinese name is "Weixin", which is a pun on "for sex" in Mandarin (for which its "people nearby" feature originally saw heavy usage). As a decentralized social network, Bitchat might see similar usage.
subscribed 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe. I have bitchat installed and on in the rather large city. I have yet to see another person on :)
logicchains 1 hours ago [-]
It's only a matter of time until it or something like it catches on as a replacement for Telegram's "People/Groups Nearby" feature that France forced it to remove.
zenethian 6 hours ago [-]
Is this bit-chat or bitch-at?
subscribed 6 hours ago [-]
Yes :)
logicchains 5 hours ago [-]
Find out on expertsexchange.com
subscribed 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks, in a bit, I'm browsing therapistfinder.com right now.
all2 4 hours ago [-]
Have you ever heard of the rather excellent Pen Island, vendors of fine pens? On my work computer, so you can plumb the internet archive for yourself.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a suitable addition to the ATProto ecosystem :)
culi 5 hours ago [-]
It's explicitly in opposition to ATProto. That's probably why they went with Radicle and not Tangled
Thanks for combobulating. I used to use Hackysack but I switched to Phlegm after the Unhappy Kittens controversy.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Radicle: decentralised GitHub
Tangled: centralised Radicle
tdkx21 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dmboyd 5 hours ago [-]
Or a misspelling of bitch hat
5 hours ago [-]
xyst 4 hours ago [-]
BitchX was already taken
HumblyTossed 4 hours ago [-]
Yep.
tamimio 6 hours ago [-]
It depends on whom you’re talking to
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
> It depends on whom you're bitching at
FTFY
6 hours ago [-]
orliesaurus 6 hours ago [-]
Is this irc compatible?
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
Everything is pointing towards a hard "no", but I didn't dig deeper than literally read the first sentence in the README:
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.
culi 5 hours ago [-]
How would it be? Bitchat is for offline communication over Bluetooth Low Energy networks
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
only if you make it so.
jbverschoor 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 21:32:25 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Tobias Bluth vibes
https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
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.
This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
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.”
In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.
We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
Too many proper nouns in titles.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
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
So, “government” defaulting to “Indian government” is pretty sane. And relevant.
[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).
Note that you’ll never hear people saying “what’s a Google” (an equally ridiculous name) or jumping on some random YC startup with a silly name. It’s always the open source tech. It’s not random!
Joke’s on them anyway, I believe many users have embraced the alternate interpretation of the name. There’s a @BitchatMe_ Twitter account that covers BitChat news, for example. They’re just being annoying without any real effect.
* 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...
It's the same project. radicle.dev is for the protocol, radicle.network is for the network explorer.
Note that that radicle.network is a static site that you can also self host: https://radicle.network/nodes/rosa.radicle.network/rad:z4V1s...
It sounds like both are the same project, one is the “explorer” which is on a different domain so that censoring it doesn’t impact the main site
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
https://radicle.network/principles
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
1: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
3: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list
So it would be a lot clearer (read: not completely unclear), if radicle.network actually said "Radicle Explorer" somewhere. "Radicle Explorer" is a great descriptive name which instantly conveys a lot of information about what it is and does! But it doesn't appear anywhere there.
Setup machine with bluetooth receiver.
Funnel packets from Bluetooth receiver over a virtual private network (ie, wireguard, tailscale, netbird).
Then in another state/country/continent with server connected to vpn then rebroadcasts those packets over BLE.
A mesh network overlayed on top of another mesh network.
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to.
A mesh of meshes may also be possible in theory.
but someone would have to build it into a major 3rd party firmware like openwrt to get wide adoption
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
EDIT: sorry I felt too bad not to leave an explanation
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
Tangled: centralised Radicle
FTFY
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.