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@
For all those little bitches.
Where my bitchat
I read it like that first and thought it was one of these illegal apps to track your partner without them knowing.
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.
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.
Yeah, fuck Jack.
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.
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.
Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.
Seems rehashed, with more enshittification likely to be baked in. Typical tech bros.
So he took a page from Apple, copied Firechat, and will offer it to users who use Apple products. Yeah, okay, nice, I’m in.
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.
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.
Signal used to work this way and I’m still mad they dropped SMS.
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).
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
Really not interested in anything the guy with the terrible facial hair wants to make.
💯
