It is handy if you're on a plane with someone but your seats are separated because you didn't want to pay an extra $50 to sit next to each other though.
With effort, various exploitable WiFi chipsets could probably have support added too. 2km of range makes mesh networking possible even with very low user densities, especially if combined with store-and-forward.
And then there is always the possibility of a hardware dongle with LoRA with 10km range.
Then use the radicle.network site to browse that repo. For example.
Even nesting geohashes would be cool, though I think the concern is the chaos that happens when you see half a conversation but not the other (as with radio when one party is in range but the other is out). The fact is that geohashes as it is get basically down to the level of acre or so which is just a wildly precise level of granularity (though might be useful if you had a whole 12 story college dorm building all in a chat or something).
It could do with a UI tweak though so that by default it shows you the most 'zoomed in' geohash with any activity.
IRDA is 1-to-1 and basically requires both users to do nothing else but use IRDA (including being within line-of-sight of each other). For a use case like talking to a family member a few seats over on a plane, IRDA won't help you.
Bitchat, at least in principle, doesn't require you to sacrifice the entirety of your phone to constantly run Bitchat in the foreground, and can work over larger distances (and with a mesh architecture which lets you reach people that you wouldn't normally be able to reach).
Writing an app that has the equivalent of 2000s-era functionality is a day of work at most. You don't even need to, you can achieve similar objectives via Airdrop / hotspot names (the latter being used as a loophole to communicate across prison cells). This is not what Bitchat is.
There seems to be somewhat of an upswing lately though. Federation is cool again, and many of the implementations active now seem much more stable, instead of weird half-research projects that killed themselves by ignoring the real world too much (which was sometimes true to their goals, which is fine but unfortunate).
Who would advance it? Can you even get multiple parties to agree on what's in it? Is there any identity required? What's there to stop this being another "Bluejacking" vector but now with dick pics?
Given all of the above the proprietary route seems inevitable, even for protocols over Bluetooth.
AFAIK, they changed policy a few years ago, so that even if you set discoverability to "everybody", it changes back to "contacts only" after a few minutes.
FireChat was released in 2014.
I have a vague memory of sitting in school in like 2006 or 2007 and sending messages via Bluetooth to a classmate on my Sony Ericsson K750i.
Nostr purity spirals have a great way of resulting in 5 people ever seeing what you're publishing. I love the protocol but when trying to get people using it you sort of need to put apps where they are.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
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
So, “government” defaulting to “Indian government” is pretty sane. And relevant.
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...
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 tech circles, we talk a lot about friction and user experience, and those matter enormously, but they're not the be-all-end-all. We have OSS developers underestimating friction on one hand, and tech companies overestimating it on the other.
Even if something requires you to be tech-savvy to set up, people will still do it if the need is dire enough, because everybody "knows a guy". Console modchips in the 2000s are my go-to example. They were devilishly complex to set up, often requiring proficiency with a soldering iron, with stakes for failure being very high (breaking the console you just spend all your savings buying), yet everybody and their mom had one. All you needed was a friend with such a chip, who could tell you who the "guy" in your town is.
I mean, here's the first 4 URLs that show up when I Google for bitchat:
https://bitchat.free/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bitchat.droid&hl=en_US
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bitchat-mesh/id6748219622
It has additionally been copied over to Radicle... and that's OK, isn't it?
This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
Nevermind the fact it was possible to bypass it, or that they didn’t detect that I did so… nope, just a scolding of “You shouldn’t do such things.”
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...
the only ones that dont fit in are kobo where it was explained in the title (the full name is "Instapaper is now on Rakuten Kobo e-readers"), and the testflight one is obvious because the title mentioned iOS.
bitchat, radicle, gleam and tangled are newer and came from the community based hacker side instead of the commercial one where big tech and vcs live. if your project has zero marketing budget of course there will be some people who never heard of it.
Note that you’ll never hear people saying “what’s a Google” (an equally ridiculous name) or jumping on some random YC startup with a silly name. It’s always the open source tech. It’s not random!
Joke’s on them anyway, I believe many users have embraced the alternate interpretation of the name. There’s a @BitchatMe_ Twitter account that covers BitChat news, for example. They’re just being annoying without any real effect.
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:
> 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
but on a serious note it is a bit more than some guy's list, it's more of an initiative that was started by the Mozilla Foundation and is used by:
- browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Opera...
- password managers, Let's Encrypt, cURL
- Cloudflare
just to name a few.
Though yeah there have been privacy concerns and problems with projects that use outdated versions of the list outlined in Brave's paper (no affiliation):
> We present the first large-scale measurement study of how the public suffix list is used by open-source software on the Web and the privacy harm resulting from projects using outdated versions of the list.
https://brave.com/research/privacy-harms-of-public-suffix-li...
So it would be a lot clearer (read: not completely unclear), if radicle.network actually said "Radicle Explorer" somewhere. "Radicle Explorer" is a great descriptive name which instantly conveys a lot of information about what it is and does! But it doesn't appear anywhere there.
taps the sign
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
Where did you hear that from? Doesn't sound close at all.
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to.
A mesh of meshes may also be possible in theory.
but someone would have to build it into a major 3rd party firmware like openwrt to get wide adoption
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.
EDIT: sorry I felt too bad not to leave an explanation
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
Tangled: centralised Radicle
While that's a clever hybrid, Bitchat is aiming for a truly serverless, local-first experience (especially with the Bluetooth mesh aspect). Radicle’s gossip-based P2P stack mirrors that vision more closely. In this case, Radicle isn't "better" in a vacuum—it's just the right tool for a project that wants to eliminate mediating servers entirely.
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.
Just like IRC.