Walked around Fusion Festival with Bitchat running. Saw about 20 other devices and a few messages. Nobody replied to my messages. So usage isn't zero, but 20 devices out of 80000 people isn't a lot. Most hops I saw was 2, meaning there wasn't enough density to make it any meaningful distance across the festival grounds.
People interested in BitChat should download it just so you have it in case it gets popular or you find someone to use it with. I tested it and it's surreal to text without WiFi or cellular.
Bluetooth chat apps already exist. I used a really shitty looking (but functional) one called Berkanan that I found by searching the App Store for a Bluetooth chat app to talk to friends on ryan air flights where we weren’t sitting together across Europe last year.
> Messages route through nearby devices (max 7 hops)
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
That Radicle site design is an interesting take for a git repo platform. Good use of full width spacing, well thought out navigation, nice code rendering. I dig it.
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
For people who know what Bitchat and Radicle and GitHub and India are, though, and saw the Indian government threatened GitHub to remove Bitchat, this is news.
I think radicle.dev is the software that lets you store issues and PRs inside a Git repo, and radicle.network is some kind of interface to people's hosts that run the Radicle software. Something like that?
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
the main reason they mentioned [1] for radicle.network is because their old domain radicle.xyz was blocked in some places by some lists that they think was because it may have hosted certain UGC that triggered some flags.
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
All social media is censored. If you think yours isnt, you're free to test that hypothesis by posting the N word over and over. I suspect you'll find that you get censored for doing so.
Mesh networks don't scale beyond a few thousand nodes if the nodes move frequently. Nobody has found a way to make that work. You can push another order of magnitude if you give up on decentralisation.
It could be deliberate. Like Wechat's Chinese name is "Weixin", which is a pun on "for sex" in Mandarin (for which its "people nearby" feature originally saw heavy usage). As a decentralized social network, Bitchat might see similar usage.
Everything is pointing towards a hard "no", but I didn't dig deeper than literally read the first sentence in the README:
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.
Tobias Bluth vibes
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.
We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.
[Some well-liked but niche tech] switched their code forge to [a decentralized code forge].
Tbh I'm surprised how many on HN seem unfamiliar with Tangled and Radicle (and Bitchat and Gleam).
* Gemini is now on Mac
* OpenClaw is now on Android
* Instapaper is now on Kobo
* Gitzy is now on Testflight
* Webpack is now on Bluesky
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
Too many proper nouns in titles.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
Indian government*. They shut off internet access and order people to remove stuff all the time. Nobody pays any attention to them.
It's still up on Github. https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
It's the same project. radicle.dev is for the protocol, radicle.network is for the network explorer.
Note that that radicle.network is a static site that you can also self host: https://radicle.network/nodes/rosa.radicle.network/rad:z4V1s...
It sounds like both are the same project, one is the “explorer” which is on a different domain so that censoring it doesn’t impact the main site
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
https://radicle.network/principles
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
1: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
3: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
Setup machine with bluetooth receiver.
Funnel packets from Bluetooth receiver over a virtual private network (ie, wireguard, tailscale, netbird).
Then in another state/country/continent with server connected to vpn then rebroadcasts those packets over BLE.
A mesh network overlayed on top of another mesh network.
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
EDIT: sorry I felt too bad not to leave an explanation
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
Tangled: centralised Radicle
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
FTFY
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.