Let’s build an app to liberate communications but only release it inside a closed garden. Great idea
From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.
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).
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.
Bitch At
Lmao
Bit chat
Bitch at
Being Jack Dorsey, I’m going with the latter.
“IRC vibes” -> maybe intended, see BitchX.
Just realized that could be read as “bit chicks”, which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.
messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet
So he’s made a shitty version of Briar and crammed crypto into it?
Just wait for AI enhancements.
Briar doesn’t have an iOS client an never will
This doesn’t have an android client 😀
Like I said, Briar is better
Interesting. I wonder why Briar won’t have an iOS client?
In this context I think “crypto” means your message is encrypted across hops, not that you have to pay to send/receive messages.
Bitch@
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
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.
Yeah, fuck Jack.
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.
I mean…I guess thanks for the stepping off point? Android has the Briar Project, which couldn’t be distributed for iOS due to Apple’s license fuckery. I’m at least curious enough to look through this and see what they’ve done different.
I think the most useless part of this is using BT only which has a range of what…40ft?
There are plenty of situations where that’s useful, especially if you can have group chats with images. Think airplanes, weddings, concerts, sports arenas. And if you have meshing and store and forward when nodes are moving around, you can cover a large area that may not have internet. It’s a legitimate tool that no one has done right yet - and as apple only, this is t yet either.
I wanted something like this for weddings or group camping type events for sharing photos to multiple others at once.
Isnt that what QuickShare and Airdrop solves?
And LocalSend
QuickShare, AirDrop and LocalSend all use WiFi, which can be a problem when using a VPN (it is for me).
Turn it off temporarily?
Right but turning the VPN off invalidates the purpose of using a VPN. And even if it didn’t, it’s not convenient to disable on both devices and then turn it back on. The whole purpose of this software is convenience.
Airdrop is two people at a time. Say we had a group of 8 people I don’t want to do 7 air drop exchanges to get all the photos.
Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.
Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.
I mean, what is actually needed is a secure messaging app that scrapes wraps existing apps. So when two people send messages through FancyMessages, they are secure. But then if only one person has FancyMessages, and the other has Facebook messenger, then they could still comminicate - the FB user using Messenger as usual, and our hero’s FancyMessages app picking up the FB messages and passing them on through the FancyMessages UI.
This is a great idea, but it would be difficult to manage.
It reminds me of the instant messenger wars during the late 1990s/early 2000s.
AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a virtual monopoly on the industry, and so when Microsoft started breaking into it with MSN Messenger they cracked AIM’s protocol so their users could communicate with AIM users. This enraged AOL, and there was a wild cat-and-mouse updates battle for a few months. AOL would push an update to block Microsoft, then Microsoft would push an update to get around that. Sometimes there were multiple updates from both sides per day.
And then there was Trillian messenger just sneaking through the middle providing access to both, mostly unnoticed (at least for a while).
Beeper is like this, but the list of supported messaging apps is limited. It does have FB messenger though.
Signal used to work this way and I’m still mad they dropped SMS.
This is nothing like the ones you list, this is local only no internet
Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.
And more is better so people get used to using them and skip the telcos and other stuff that can be tracked
None of them cross the line yet to be “good enough” in practice for all the use cases of an offline messenger. Briar is probably the best, but not useful if even one of your group is on iOS.
That’s a good point. And to add to it, I’ve tried using Briar as an emergency option if there’s no Internet. And there seems to be a massive flaw in that scenario: you need the Internet to authenticate yourself on the app. So if there’s no Internet it’s useless. I just tried switching off WiFi and 5G on my phone and yup, can’t log in, so can’t use it.
For all those little bitches.
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.
