Let’s build an app to liberate communications but only release it inside a closed garden. Great idea
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.
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
youtube-dl and yt-dlp are under unlicense. it’s just boilerplate legalese for public domain
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.
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.
Ive read it called bitch@
‘Where my bitchat?’
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?
I’m sure the background limitations are a big part, but I wonder if there’s also limits to what they can do with bluetooth
In this context I think “crypto” means your message is encrypted across hops, not that you have to pay to send/receive messages.
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
Bitch@
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…
One runs a mailbox app on any old disused android phone, it temporary stores content and deliver it to the main unit once the connection is restored.
Bit simpler to install an app and scan a qr code for the average user compared to even configuring an XMPP client IMO.
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.
Bluetooth ranges are quite large now.
But an example even if someone is a foot away would be a concert or event where it’s to loud.
Could be useful on a plane: If you have different seats than someone and don’t want to pay for your airline’s ridiculous data prices. Although, most airlines I fly on(american, delta, air canada, united) all have free RCS/Facebook/Whatsapp, but not necessarily Signal, Telegram, Matrix, or your preferred secure service.
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.
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.
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 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?
It’s definitely limiting. LoRa wan meshed network is more useful. But most people don’t have a LoRa capable device. I could see something like this at a protest or public event at least. If there were enough nodes in the area the network could span hundreds to thousands of feet with the right conditions. But that’s a big ask ATM.
Meshtastic requires bespoke hardware, it’ll always stay a marginal tool
This requires: an iPhone.
And someone will make a bridge from this to Meshtastic in a while anyway
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.
The best app to Bitch At things.
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.
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.
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.
And more is better so people get used to using them and skip the telcos and other stuff that can be tracked
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.
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.
