inigyouan hour ago
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.
Qisionan hour ago
That's already a lot for such a niche project.
inigyouan hour ago
Many CCCers attend.
plebian2 hours ago
If they care so much about availability maybe they should reconsider including libs.gms.location and be available on F-Droid (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/24907#...)
Cider99863 hours ago
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.
allthetime2 hours ago
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.
gritzko2 hours ago
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
freehorsean hour ago
I remember when sending messages and files through IR was a standard default feature in (dump) phones two decades ago. It is a bit sad how technology in some ways regresses when certain anti-incentives apply.
dmix4 hours ago
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.
RobRiveraan hour ago
That name
Tobias Bluth vibes
bad_usernamean hour ago
IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.
baron3dl3 hours ago
Bitchat is an AOS (https://andotherstuff.org/#foundry-projects) project. Surprised, they didn't rehost it on ngit (https://gitworkshop.dev/), which is also an AOS project.
TranquilMarmot2 hours ago
> 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?
mkayokay2 hours ago
Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
momentmaker2 hours ago
For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.
miohtama24 minutes ago
Discussed earlier on HN
illithid02 hours ago
Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.
nfbdhdfbf2 hours ago
It definitely won’t.
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
qphe952 hours ago
Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
mastaxan hour ago
Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me.
qphe958 minutes ago
We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
freehorse43 minutes ago
I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
culian hour ago
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
miohtama22 minutes ago
That's exactly why we fight back harder and do not bury our heads in the sand or anywhere else.
This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
stackghost7 minutes ago
It's genuinely hard to tell if this comment is satire or not.
HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
wat10000an hour ago
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.
freehorse41 minutes ago
Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
ranger_dangeran hour ago
When people talk about the Streisand Effect, they usually refer to content that someone wants to disappear entirely, not merely lower its usage.
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.
xyzsparetimexyz3 hours ago
Yo where's my
qwertyastronaut2 hours ago
I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.
ronsor2 hours ago
And I thought Poob already had it for you.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
inigyouan hour ago
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.
Mistletoe24 minutes ago
This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different, some kind of centralized corpo dystopia. I’ve installed it!
thisisnotauser3 hours ago
I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"
TaupeRanger2 hours ago
And at least one comment references "Curtains for Zoosha"
culian hour ago
it's just two recent examples (Gleam on Tangled and now Bitchat on Radicle) and they're both the same format.
[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).
culian hour ago
Here's some less popular posts in the past year that people didn't make Poob jokes about:
* 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...
fooker2 hours ago
It's a basic step to make a plumbis
Avicebronan hour ago
It's 2026, learn to flimble. A plumbis won't get far in today's economy.
Qisionan hour ago
Is it Jack Dorsey who moved the repo or someone else?
2coloran hour ago
It seems like the core dev is behind this: https://x.com/callebtc/status/2080608602432082217
pioneerjeff5 hours ago
Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？
ckcheng4 hours ago
Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
KennyBlanken2 hours ago
What a bunch of clickbaity nonsense.
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
subscribed4 hours ago
Yes, it's in the first paragraph of https://bitchat.free/.
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imtringued4 hours ago
I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.
2coloran hour ago
Radicle contributor here.
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...
cosmojg3 hours ago
I'm pretty sure that's the same project.
chanux3 hours ago
I assumed they are the same :-O
lostmsu4 hours ago
One seems to be built on top of the other? Very confusing though, I agree.
varun_ch3 hours ago
I found https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
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
IshKebab3 hours ago
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:
behindsight2 hours ago
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.
1: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
inigyouan hour ago
What if you disagree with the centralisation of the internet into some guy's suffix list?
ckchengan hour ago
Yes, I think it’s like a decentralized GitHub?
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xyst2 hours ago
In theory, this could work.
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.
guess_who_is_it3 hours ago
jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.
inigyouan hour ago
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.
vitalyan818430 minutes ago
in case of old twitter, the blue checkmarks and their likeminded folx were allowed to hatespeak, "brigade", doxx, libel, call to violence, anything at all, as long as their infinite vitriol was directed at certain groups implicitly but obviously designated as unprotected. the other side, on the other hand, was subject to "private platforms can do whatever the fuck they want" kind of moderation, where even "off-platform conduct" could get you summarily banned.
bigyabai3 hours ago
Dorsey's legacy is promoting cryptocurrency. Censorship is part-and-parcel with owning any social media.
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
ck24 hours ago
btw what's the current state of mesh wifi?
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
inigyouan hour ago
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.
VCFundedGenYer4 hours ago
Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.
khimaros14 minutes ago
i have this pet theory that it was inspired by BitchX (they prominently mention being like IRC)
culi3 hours ago
Probably on purpose. Like "Broken, But Whole"
inigyouan hour ago
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the title of a video game, because it's South Park and they do that sort of thing.
culian hour ago
Ah yeah, that was the name. Thanks
logicchains3 hours ago
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.
subscribed2 hours ago
Maybe. I have bitchat installed and on in the rather large city. I have yet to see another person on :)
zenethian5 hours ago
Is this bit-chat or bitch-at?
subscribed4 hours ago
Yes :)
logicchains3 hours ago
Find out on expertsexchange.com
all23 hours ago
Have you ever heard of the rather excellent Pen Island, vendors of fine pens? On my work computer, so you can plumb the internet archive for yourself.
subscribed2 hours ago
Thanks, in a bit, I'm browsing therapistfinder.com right now.
embedding-shape4 hours ago
Sounds like a suitable addition to the ATProto ecosystem :)
culi3 hours ago
It's explicitly in opposition to ATProto. That's probably why they went with Radicle and not Tangled
VulgarExigency2 hours ago
What the hell are Radicle and Tangled
culian hour ago
They're curtains for Zoosha. An alternative to Poob (which is now on Pheebo).
EDIT: sorry I felt too bad not to leave an explanation
inigyouan hour ago
Thanks for combobulating. I used to use Hackysack but I switched to Phlegm after the Unhappy Kittens controversy.
rapnie2 hours ago
https://radicle.dev/ Peer-to-peer code forge.
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
inigyouan hour ago
Radicle: decentralised GitHub
Tangled: centralised Radicle
tdkx213 hours ago
[dead]
dmboyd3 hours ago
Or a misspelling of bitch hat
xyst2 hours ago
BitchX was already taken
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HumblyTossed3 hours ago
Yep.
tamimio5 hours ago
It depends on whom you’re talking to
inigyouan hour ago
> It depends on whom you're bitching at
FTFY
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orliesaurus4 hours ago
Is this irc compatible?
embedding-shape4 hours ago
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.
culi3 hours ago
How would it be? Bitchat is for offline communication over Bluetooth Low Energy networks
inigyouan hour ago
only if you make it so.
jbverschoor4 hours ago
[flagged]