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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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. No good.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
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.
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.
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])
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.
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.
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 some pocket of the third world. No international travel. Limited internet. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have now. (Or something in betwee.)
The reality is 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Or planes.
In Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.
This particular one supports mesh, so the range could be way way higher.
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.
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?
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
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.
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. No good.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
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.
True but I assume Apple users understand they exclude themselves by demanding a "benevolent dictator" insuring they are "safe".
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.
This is entirely false, Apple allows the use of threads in their applications.
but having the bluetooth part working on iOS should not be an issue right?
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...
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.
Apple pulled similar apps from the App Store: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...
Why?
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.
But the person controls the product, and the product will continue to develop, so the person's character is relevant to the quality of the product.
This is an interesting enhancement using Meshtastic to expand the range of bitchat https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542
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])
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
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.
Every time I've logged into Bitchat, nobody appears to be online - across the entire United States.
What happened to that fire chat app that did the same thing back in 2014 or something?
Here are original posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146
Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space
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 some pocket of the third world. No international travel. Limited internet. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have now. (Or something in betwee.)
The reality is 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.