Bitchat – decentralized peer-to-peer messaging

Totally different use case

I could never find anyone else on Bitchat, it was just me when I opened it. If anything Telegram is a better replacement for Discord, you don't have the file size limitations and a push to sell you Nitro.

I think this would take implementing something with (say) standalone BLE repeaters people could plug in and stick out a window or put up on a pole with a solar panel.

They way they are trying to do with LoRa networks.

Just something plug in and play with a higher tx/rx power , external antenna support, doing its thing 24/7 without client impact.

And at that rate I’d just as soon go back to UUCP style/BBS “email” between nodes too where it’s best availability or you get a few daily downloads. Reticulum is the closest one to having the foundation for any of that.

I can find some chatter roaming around on foot with b_tchat but it’s useless in my neighborhood and on my property

It has potential but I think it needs something to make it scale to a small town or at least a city neighborhood with adhoc or rogue repeaters.

I have a few meshtastic nodes stuck up on roofs but they’re not very useful either. All of these projects seem to have “the right idea” and come from the right place but so far imo every single one falls short in either adoption or implementation which is why we don’t have a decentralized p2p discord killer — even just a local one - YET

And local is fine with me I’m so tired of social media and apps being poisoned by bots and extranjeros with agendas and endless spam anyway.

I made friends and was entertained and informed with old BBSes that were only dialed into by a couple of nerds and cranks in a town of 50000 . The system even dialed out to send and receive our email to other sites once or twice a day (UUCP) theres absolutely no reason something like this can’t thrive or be useful if a new generation of people can learn to use and live with something we already had

I love the idea of something that crosses the line between atproto and UUCP as well, maybe no bandwidth for images and videos in this scenario. Ive ridden the firehose a few times and just the text alone would overwhelm a p2p system as we know it, or have a consistent band of public unlicensed spectrum for today

Though nothing could stop people from going back to using uuencode and uudecode to use it for that anyway heh

This is bog standard moderation. A repost of a topic within a year of the original submission is considered a duplicate [1].

A new submission is only warranted and allowed if there is “significant new information” - e.g., a major upgrade or announcement.

Three months ago we had another huge discussion about Bitchat in Gaza [2], which qualified due to having “significant new information”.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358