One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage.
You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
It's getting movement in tough political environments like Uganda: https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-p...
And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.
Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.
The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.
We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.
Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.
Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.
One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth.
Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.
Yeah I can imagine a jam-packed cruise ship might be useful provided the signal propagates from deck to another (unlikely), but it's quite a niché use case.
>Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you?
Why would that matter? Use Signal to protect the content, or use Cwtch to protect content and metadata. If you need to exchange secret communications that mustn't go through some server, why not discuss f2f with no phones around? You'd also eliminate attack vectors where your (chances are, Chinese Android) device spies on you, as well as anyone who has compromised it to read messages from screen.
> Why would that matter?
Reliability? Why should we want to centralize things unnecessarily? It's nice as a fallback but then so too is P2P.
On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones?
For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.
Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
> For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless
Projects like this one are a step towards fixing that. Personally I choose to keep both street and topographical maps of the entire continent locally on my phone. There are plenty of uses for a computer without a WAN connection.
I remember a different app thats was used on e.g. festivals where the local broadcast cells where overwhelmed when a quite rural area suddenly had to server 50000 to 100000 additional people and 3g and 4G basically stopped working. I think it was called Firechat or something.
Still, wouldn't a wifi meshnet be a better choice for these scenario's?
It's a cruiseship. Your family are at the nearest bar. Just get off your ass and go and give them the message.
> Just get off your ass and go and give them the message...
If I need to have all 4 members of the family meet me at the pool, first I need to go find each one of them. They could all be at different place. And then tell them individually to meet me at the pool? Is that the better solution you are proposing?
This seems a bit reductive. You could use this argument for any small town
It was how things were for a long time, and in a lot of ways it was better.
I've checked, they're not there. Now what?
Tell them to install bitchat. How to deliver the message to them is left as an exercise to the reader.
I have seen a test of bitchat using radio communication over a distance of more than 5 km. There were also other methods to extend BT range.
Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.
> That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings[...]
Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.
It depends on the country you're in, obviously. I've been to countries where protests are illegal (even 1-man protests with a blank sheet of paper).
They are.
I prefer voting. I find protests annoying. They're a good way for people to let off steam, hang out with friends, get photos for the international press etc. but they're not the right mechanism for finding out what the people want.
They're definitely effective when most of the country wants the government out, but by that point a vote would certainly do just as well, and with fewer flying bricks.
Name three currently existing democracies. USA is out (protests illegal), Europe is out (protests require registration which is denied for anything that has a risk of effecting change), the Middle East and Asia are out for obvious reasons. Maybe there's a democracy somewhere in Africa?
Or planes.
but i use mobile internet because of the distance. how does bluetooth help with that?
What is your implication? This app is not for talking across the globe with people.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible. The bitchat app serves the niche where talking face to face is not an option and talking across the globe is not needed. And the app explicitly states "infrastructure independence" as one of its design goals: "the network remains functional during internet outages", which cannot be served by internet-based apps by design.
I believe bitchat can also use the wider internet to exchange messages. So it is an app that can use either the internet or various other more local options. That seems like a desirable improvement to me.
Back in the 2010s I used the 'Notes' applications to send messages via Bluetooth on my Sony Ericsson to chat with a girl in the next bunk.
There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory.
Fun night!
Don't keep us guessing, what did you guys talk about :)
Now that Wi-Fi Aware is supported on iOS, I think supporting it should significantly expand the transmission range.
In Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.
Internet is exploited by US as a tool for regime change [1] in coordination with sponsored on the ground terrorism. [1]
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
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I think you need to try to get MUCH more video and photo footage out. I heard thousands have been killed.
This particular one supports mesh, so the range could be way way higher.
In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?
Yes, but messages can be encrypted so relaying parties can't read them. And yes, it would have an effect on battery and have very limited bandwidth compared to whatsapp (no sharing videos etc).
Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?
Sorry I should be clearer: I think it actually might be feasible in a high population density area and if everyone uses it, but because of the limited range of bluetooth you really do need a high density of active nodes for it to work reliably.
A messaging system that often takes hours or days to get messages to the receiver is fairly useless and people will continue to prefer centralised systems, so there's a severe chicken-and-egg problem to solve there before anything like this can work
I see two use cases: * Communication between protestors * Illegal activities, but here I can imagine that bluetooth range is too small
The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
Is this LoRa BT network thing something that actually exists? Is there a coverage map?
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
> Communication between protestors > Illegal activities
Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
This is simply an app that allows to communicate through bluetooth locally. Why are you saying its only two use cases are protesting and criminals?
Im not saying that those are the only use cases, but I really see that there multiple other apps that make the "normal" communication much easier.
I remember when Telegram had a "Nearby" feature. I remember seeing many not-so-legal activities around me, even in the range of 1 km.
When your Ayatollah decides to shut down internet and you are near people you don't really know in an urban environment?
Consider if you live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed all the telecoms equipment across the Gaza strip (and everything else). You were ordered to leave your home by Israeli soldiers, but now the school you're sheltering in is being bombed. You may need to leave, but you believe there may be sniper drones outside.
- You want to check in with people around you about what to do - You want to check on the health of your family, from whom you were separated
I don't know. I do not like Jack Dorey's involvement. Not a big fan of his.
I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)
There’s no app for Apple platforms making it a lot less useful.
That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.
but having the bluetooth part working on iOS should not be an issue right?
This is entirely false, Apple allows the use of threads in their applications.
Oh I found a better explanation
>iOS doesn’t allow apps to fork subprocesses. While on the desktop Tor is running as a separate process, on iOS Tor is hacked to run as a thread inside the app itself. Therefore, you can’t have a system-wide Tor process like desktop and Android. If Tor is running in one app, and you open a different one, it’s not automagically going to start using Tor.
https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Tor-app-for-iPad-...
True but I assume Apple users understand they exclude themselves by demanding a "benevolent dictator" insuring they are "safe".
Briar has the advantage of being usable with bluetooth and internet so it makes it much more useful.
Bitchat also has internet based chat, in addition to bluetooth mesh.
fair point, especially in the west. But looking at the market share, Android is probably the platform to build for, especially if you have an additional phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Apple pulled similar apps from the App Store: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...
Similar? Very different. The HKmap.live app was build and marketed directly for the protests. It tracked social media and geolocated where the police and protests were happening, etc. This is a big distinction.
I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim.
Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.
If you don't like a thing and share that dislike, care to elaborate your reasoning so others can profit from it?
Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.
It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
Thinking that good reputation in a law translates to a good lawyer is just as mature as thinking that a bad reputation translates to a bad lawyer, just two sides of the same coin. Credibility can be so cruel, it can make a brilliant mathematician like Terry Tao preemptively decline to read your mathematical arguments basically forever.
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
No they don't, it's permissionless technology. Read the web site.
Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.
Is this true? My understanding was that Twitter was not really moderated, because of Dorsey?
Also why reinventing the wheel? There is already Briar.
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Hopefully, the browser Bluetooth API will receive more support (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...). Web-based PWAs are more suitable because apps are subject to app store censorship.
What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)
* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.
* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.
Does not work without Google Play services. No-go.
This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])
Not sure about bitchat, but Briar is being used in Iran right now. https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdo...
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
> Briar is being used in Iran right now
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
Good call, I'd also like to know if this is actually true
Living under the rock of meaningless political theater is not great [1]
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Considering that my Bluetooth headset disconnects when I even think about looking at my microwave, I can't trust Bluetooth any further than 10 feet...
If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.
This is an interesting enhancement using Meshtastic to expand the range of bitchat https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542
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.
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.
Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.
It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.
edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
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.
Finally...a dedicated app to bitch at people.
OMG you're right. I cannot unsee..
Now I cannot unsee it...
A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.
A bit like expert sex change.
I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.
Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?
I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.
Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
What happened to that fire chat app that did the same thing back in 2014 or something?
I remember distinctly that the developers said they were working on a next generation version of it and it just never happened.
I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.
I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications.
The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.
In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.
Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).
Thought this could have been used in Iran but I guess it was a bit immature still.
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Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space
We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
> 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 $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
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.
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.
WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.
Bitchat is out for a while now, why is hyoping now?
Every time I've logged into Bitchat, nobody appears to be online - across the entire United States.
My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.
We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.
So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.
If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.
We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.
bithcat is out for like.. a long time. Why is hyping now?
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that is a super good callout.
this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time.
but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage."
i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.
Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
I'd consider end-to-end encryption to also be table-stakes, at least opportunistically after the first message in each direction. With encryption cached messages are far less harmful (though still leaking very useful metadata), without encryption it seems almost trivial to spy on any communications
> The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations
If I understand correctly, this would still be true if the recipient is connected.