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don't nazis already have telegram
Now they have a second option.
Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.
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
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.
youtube-dl and yt-dlp are under unlicense. it's just boilerplate legalese for public domain
Bitch At
Lmao
messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet
So he's made a shitty version of Briar and crammed crypto into it?
In this context I think "crypto" means your message is encrypted across hops, not that you have to pay to send/receive messages.
Just wait for AI enhancements.
Briar doesn’t have an iOS client an never will
This doesn’t have an android client 😀
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
I wanted something like this for weddings or group camping type events for sharing photos to multiple others at once.
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.
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.
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.