Testing Bitchat at the music festival | Hacker News Reader

Testing Bitchat at the music festival

primal.net

105 pointsalexcos55 comments

This has been tried so many times[0][1]… heck even I made an app like this once using WiFi direct.

The idea is so solid and yet there are just enough pitfalls between Bluetooth reliability, platform differences, getting critical mass for effective relaying…it’s such a bummer that we can’t figure this one out. Decentralized message relays have the potential to work anywhere, be fully private, extremely difficult to block/censor, and (in theory) can scale indefinitely.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat

[1]: https://briarproject.org/

The FindMy network is already doing this at scale with location data. Offline messaging might be too niche of a use case for Apple but surely they’ve considered it.

But does WiFi Direct work on iOS so we can be on a music festival and mesh between your friends (Apple) mobiles? This would be much better than Bluetooth. I read about the MultipeerConnectivity framework but I am confused because in a recent discussion someone says that WiFi Direct has (development?) limitations? ELI5 please.

Apple uses AWDL, a proprietary protocol that predates WiFi direct. WiFi direct is kind of a mess, and then there’s WiFi aware. Last I heard when I was working in this space a couple of years ago there was supposed to be a WiFi direct 2 that would (as usual) unify standards and solve all the issues.

AWDL isn’t FindMy. It’s mostly for Airdrop and also uses Bluetooth for the initial connection then switches to WiFi for high bandwidth data.

The EU has mandated that Apple should support WiFi Direct for interoperability with things outside its ecosystem, so it's coming.

Which is hilarious because WiFi Direct is a mess. Possibly this will be the kick the industry needs to get a decent P2P ad hoc wifi protocol going, but more likely Apple will just implement what the EU demands and it will be just as terrible as wifi direct is today, so nobody will use it anyway and AWDL, as bad as it is, will remain the usable protocol in this space.

I’m not sure it would since the whole Bluetooth stack is already designed for P2P. Apple’s network is a true mesh though and not point to point. If you share locations with your friends on FindMy using iPhones or AirTags you will get updates via the encrypted mesh network (that includes other peoples’ iPhones) without being connected to a WiFi or cell network.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/find-my-security-se...

Good link.

My interpretation here is that the location of a missing device can be passed around via Bluetooth mesh but that the last send must be sent via cellular or WiFi back to iCloud. So it’s P2P to relay getting location info back to final device with internet connection back to iCloud but the finder still need to connect to iCloud to view updated location.

“Find My works offline by sending out short range Bluetooth signals from the missing device that can be detected by other Apple devices in use nearby. Those nearby devices then relay the detected location of the missing device to iCloud so users can locate it in the Find My app—all while protecting the privacy and security of all the users involved.”

That's not true at all, Find My network doesn't do meshing.

It very much doesn't. The FindMy network just scans for BT beacons around, and reports what it sees to Apple's servers via the cellular network. It very much doesn't do mesh networking at all.

The missing piece might be thinking of these mesh networks as a new "tier 4" network and routing to the larger internet as quickly as possible.

One huge advantage of this (beyond better networking) would be that apps could use existing IP APIs which would help abstract away vendor/implementation specific problems and improve adoption.

Note that this doesn't necessarily depend on a tier 3 network so you could still accomplish your goals. The internet already has enough features to support partitions and local discovery.

You of course still have to have fixed administrative domains but in reality you always do. Someone takes initiative and sets up the group chat/gets their friends into it. I think if you're willing to mentally separate the network topology from the administrative topology this could be solved.

Of course that's really boring. It's just MDNS and ad-hoc Wifi plus some routing. Everything is pretty much already there (although iOS probably won't let you do it, as usual.)

I worked with BLE recently and found it very reliable. Also I was surprised at range it was able to communicate. Like 10 meters with walls - it works. Similar to WiFi.

I think, it's all matter of inventing a proper protocol on top of it, and enough work-hours put into the implementation to make software reliable.

I really wish a "major" messaging service would adopt something like this, at least as a fallback. Don't give me two apps, give me one. This seems right up the alley for a project like Signal. Like a way to wade yourself into decentralization without necessarily needing to go all the way. Hell, it could save bandwidth just by file transfers alone and certainly it is up there with the mission of privacy.

I think it really will take a bigger platform to make this possible because you need an already existing network. I doubt Apple would ever do it, but hey, I mean text messaging and calls through Airdrop? Pitch it as for emergencies like when the phone lines go down? These are legitimate use cases.

I agree with the general sentiment but I hesitate to rely on any platform being around for a long time. It would be cool if they could interop with other platforms supporting it, though.

If anyone here is interested in creating more reliable mesh messaging, you might want to consider store&forward with efficient reconciliation as a primitive.

I helped create a library for reconciliation which might be useful: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch

One notion would be to divide time in to periods small enough to keep messages relevant, but big enough that all devices can be in sync well beyond that-- say an hour. Then constantly try to get every device it total sync over the last N periods. This kind of model can benefit from mobile devices... e.g. magnet a hub onto a trash collection cart and someone is magically ferrying messages from one side of the event to the other even if there are radio holes in the middle.

Use of efficient reconciliation keeps the traffic closer to O(devices + messages) rather than O(devices * messages) created by 'everyone repeats' messaging.

Unfortunately it hasn't really been an option open to the sort of devices that meshtastic runs on because they're extremely limited in memory.

Yeah, this mirrors my experience trying to get FireChat to work at Las Vegas EDC years prior. Unfortunate to see progress is about the same.

Going to Burning Man for the first time this year. Some of my campmates are keen on giving mesh networking another shot through https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.

I am interested to hear if you also try bitchat at the burn.

or https://berty.tech/features

I was initially optimistic about Bitchat but after investigating it does just seem to be an early hobby project. We need more than individual apps meshing via Bluetooth. I’m doubtful Bitchat will ever be used outside of a group of nerds at a festival.

We need a standardised protocol commonly implemented by manufacturers. The closest we have now that I’m aware of is Apple’s Find My network in which it is possible to smuggle arbitrary data very slowly. [0]

[0]: https://github.com/positive-security/send-my

This is the second comment that mentions Find My. Find My just sends data from BT beacons to Apple, it's not a mesh network at all.

Seems you're right.

I worked with BLE Meshing in industry products. With a lot of hops and a bit of traffic it becomes very unreliable quickly.

Introducing something like TCP o top most likely will kill it because of the network load over a very thin and unreliable connections just causes more mess.

Addendum: this "experience" is a few years old. Maybe newer BLE revisions improved this.

Have you experimented with Meshtastic and Reticulum?

Not sure if a different comm stack other than bluetooth or WiFi would help.

I work with raw LoRa a lot and it works great.

Reticulum is pretty much a one-man-show that got a lot of press. Never saw a real network with that thing.

Meshtastic is great for communication with up to two hops. But it can become very unreliable if people use configuring wrong roles like Router/etc. in wrong position.

This would work better if you abandon the "connection model". However normal smartphones don't let you listen to packets while hopping channels and then injecting. Typically need root for that.

Bluetooth and wifi messengers have been awful over the years, but pretty much every hardware messanger (Gotenna, beartooth, and now meshtastic/meshcore/TTN/lora etc) have been very effective.

Also FRS radios are still a thing.

Though it still would be nice for cell phones to be telecommunicators instead of *cell* communicators.

Meshtastic works great up to two hops.

FRS radios are bulky; Meshtastic is the way. It's really made for this type of event.

RussFest is back baby!

Side note: if you offer a dark theme and have a toggle "automatically switch based on system theme", make that the default option. And don't bury a dark theme under settings... I'm nearly certain that everyone that uses a dark theme wants to use it everywhere by default. And since we're kinda talking privacy here, don't rely on cookies... Everything is light theme by default, including the OS and browser. If users are using dark theme then they very likely made a conscious decision to do that.

Stop treating dark theme users as second class citizens. I'm also looking at you Wikipedia... There's like 30 browser addons, you can change the one line of code to solve all that...

I like the idea, I’ve been wandering around soma and mission for a week but not found anyone online

Would have been interesting if Bitchat used meshtastic so that they didn't have to reinvent the whole meshing network part, that part is a hard problem to get right.

so is it

Bit Chat

Bitch At?

And is it somehow connected to bitcoin? This post mentions buying beer in exchange for "sats" so perhaps it is.

The entirely-in-lowercase page of the actual project does not clarify any of these questions. Not that they're more than idle curiosity given that the conclusion of this review is "it didn't work".

it’s fairly obviously bit chat, named most likely in homage to bitcoin, due to its decentralized nature, though there is no connection beyond that

lol it's just a LARP project marketed by jack and his conman buddy calle. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. Briarproject dot org already exists and is better. These LARPers will likely use it to steal someone's bitcoins using it.

For context, briar is android-only and bitchat was released for ios initially. Afaik calle did the android release on his own, vibe coded iirc.

Calle is a genius and is pushing this space forward, and Jack has the capital to get it there. Ignore the haters, we can have all the things we want now, it’s just going to take a few iterations and lessons learned.

Calle is a decent coder, outside of that he has plenty of flaws.

Neither Calle nor Dorsey can solve the adoption issue, that's something they both struggle with vis-a-vis decentralized projects. Knowing Jack this is more likely to end up as an NFT marketplace app than anything that someone might want to use.

Jack is very strongly bitcoin only & anti "crypto". He sees Bitcoin alone as the Internet's missing money protocol. There is zero chance of what you suggest might happen.

Correct, Jack is even going to make double sha256 mining chips in the US.

There will be no NFTs. Jack is Bitcoin (only).

This. Jack Dorsey had his "out" from the tech industry with Twitter, but he mismanaged it and started shilling crypto before he could turn it around. He's a wannabe white-hat incapable of monetizing good solutions and equally bad at improving upon free ones. If it weren't for his clout as "oh yeah the Twitter guy" then he'd be washed away in the sea of 0.1x engineers making the same AI-generated tinker-toys.

You'd hope that a guy like him could see the writing on the wall, and complete the transition to a full-time celebrity asskisser like Sam Altman did. Nope, he wants to roleplay as Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic to fill the hole of ennui that's consumed his identity since selling Twitter. At least he looks like he's having fun.

Is a 'Bit' prefix now solely read as a bitcoin reference?

I thought it existed before bitcoin as, like, some computer thing or the platonic ideal of information. Did I get that wrong? Does 'bit' just mean bitcoin?

It was popular for BitTorrent but torrenting isn't as popular these days

No, I’m explicitly wondering if it’s “bit as in Bitcoin” because there’s mention of sending a few satoshis.

"crypto" as a prefix also used to refer to other things, not to mention the absolute absurdity of the term "web3" for an ecosystem that has yet to produce even a single key mainstream application... I'm going to go out on a limb here say that maybe the people using the prefix in that way don't particularly care about whether their terminology is informative as much as whether it conveys the narrative they want.

Been shilling crypto since 2016 and never heard "Bit" as a reference to bitcoin. Common are: Bitcoin, BTC, satoshis, sats, crypto, bitkorns, space cash.

It’s a nod to the song Where My B At by Esham

It's tangentially related through the theme of decentralization

- It's trying to be a very decentralized chat application

- The linked post is on nostr, which decentralized broadcast messaging protocol

- Bitcoin is a decentralized money protocol

- Nostr has the capability to send bitcoin between users via the lightning network via https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/57.md

It takes more effort to use nostr than it does anything relatively more centralized like bluesky or mastodon. So people there are the kind who are dedicated to decentralized technologies & support bitcoin.

You'd have better luck using smoke signals than trying to do anything using bluetooth.

Just a thought but would't it be a better world if we didn't had wifi and bluetooth chips in the first place and cellular modem would worked in user land and had API to build upon while not being separate black box hardware and os living it's own life, with capability to reach freaking satellite in space.

bluetooth chips is child's play compared to cellular chips, just saying.

Yeah but the big networks never want you to connect on your own terms.

POTS? Gotta pay to play. Cell network? Gotta pay and use a creepy spyware baseband.

Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

That's odd, I used "Bitch at" and it told me where Jack's mom was.

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