Bitchat is now on Radicle | Hacker News Reader

Bitchat is now on Radicle

radicle.network

270 pointsh1watt146 comments

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#...)

Looks like the repo maintainer just stopped reviewing any PRs or replying to messages. If some wants this to proceed they should probably fork it

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.

That's already a lot for such a niche project.

Many CCCers attend Fusion.

Yeah I always see zero peer lmao

As far as I'm concerned, it was used at several protest and is currently in use in Indian CJP protests. Also Indian government made a request to take down it's repo on GitHub

There is no bigger measure of success for a privacy project than getting a freedom hating government to request a takedown.

but it works?? thats actually kinda neat? i tried bringing airtags to a festival with 30k people so our group could find each other and they just shit the bed and didnt work

I could be wrong but I think the mesh hopping only works in lost mode, did you use that?

i did not, didn't know that was a limitation. wtf woulda been great to know

last time i was on it the only messages were hitler images drawn in ascii art. Gotta start somewhere I guess

They have at least added mesh wifi, but yes, the adoption pick up has been fairly slow except in do or die protest scenarios.

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.

They should add long range WiFi. For example the Espressif long range WiFi protocol (esp-now lr) should get around 2km of range.

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.

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.

Yeah! Me too.

I wonder if it's possible to make something like this that lets you plug in an arbitrary git repo URL

Install Radicle on a VPS, and create a script that clones a git repo and that then makes it available on Radicle.

Then use the radicle.network site to browse that repo. For example.

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.

I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.

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.

Bitchat and IRDA solve very different problems.

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.

I did not mean to say bitchat does the same, but that mainstream technology moved away from direct p2p, that could have evolved to sth like bitchat, to mediated modes of communication. Instead eg mainstream technology going from 1-1 IR to a p2p mesh architecture of communication (with modern bluetooth having higher range as IR etc), we got cloud, proprietary platform-specific protocols/apps etc.

Standardizing a non proprietary chat protocol over BT would be a pretty interesting prospect.

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.

Apple (sort of) did it, with (proprietary) Airdrop, and yes, it was "Bluejacking, but with dick pics."

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.

Yeah, it was growing pretty rapidly during the libp2p days and tons of interesting truly-distributed things were popping up all over, but it has fallen rather far from that height.

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).

> I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.

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.

I fire it up any time I'm in a crowded area just to see. I do wish it had vicinity based chat rather than the geohashes though, which always make it hard to select which level of granularity you want (this is referring to Internet based chats rather than mesh).

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).

I could see it being a trend on social media. How to start it though.

It does nest geohashes...

It could do with a UI tweak though so that by default it shows you the most 'zoomed in' geohash with any activity.

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.

I'm sort of surprised it's not mirrored there, but not surprised that it's main hosting isn't there. It sort of works best if people find it.

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.

I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.

And I thought Poob already had it for you.

Too many proper nouns in titles.

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 first parsed this as Bitch At

Yeah, I was thinking that the name will be prone to scunthorping.

I think it's intentional

They should register bitch.at, it seems to be available.

not sure about .at but DACH countries tend to require KYC everything and a bunch of bureaucracy if you offer encryption as a service

Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？

Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online.

Relevant discussion yesterday:

> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433

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

India governs more people than anyone else in the world.

So, “government” defaulting to “Indian government” is pretty sane. And relevant.

Yes, it's in the first paragraph of https://bitchat.free/.

That name

Tobias Bluth vibes

IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.

I will make sure to ask everyone this the next time I visit a decentralisation workshop

Yo where's my

> 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?

Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).

https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...

For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.

https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773

Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.

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

Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.

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 for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.

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

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.

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.

People can be surprisingly resourceful when they feel like they have a need to do so.

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 never even heard of the app until I saw the news it was getting banned, so I installed it out of curiosity - and I'm keeping it installed because I like the idea of it. I presume I'm not alone in this. They're basically giving it free publicity by attempting to ban it.

As soon as installation of software outside Play Store is made impossible, any such discussion is moot already anyway.

It pushed it to a place with no search-ability and significantly less users. It worked to effectively suppress the project. I say that as someone who uses Radicle and likes the project (I am hoping node search comes soon).

Are those things that have happened?

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

All of those work for me where I am, so AFAICT: It hasn't been pushed from one place to another at all. It's still where it was.

It has additionally been copied over to Radicle... and that's OK, isn't it?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. I got a lecture here about the ethics of bypassing a past employer’s MDM.

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.”

It's also called news dot hypercapitalist VC fund dot com

Discussed earlier on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433

I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.

One seems to be built on top of the other? Very confusing though, I agree.

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:

https://radicle.network/principles

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

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List

3: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list

What if you disagree with the centralisation of the internet into some guy's suffix list?

relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/

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...

> deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.

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.

Yes, I think it’s like a decentralized GitHub?

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

I'm pretty sure that's the same project.

I assumed they are the same :-O

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...

I downloaded the Radicle desktop client yesterday, entered my new username and password and... nothing happened. Tried restarting the app and do it again, but I never got past the account creation/login screen. So my Radicle adventure ended there.

Try the getting started guide: https://radicle.network/guides/getting-started

Radicle uses a key for your identity. There is no username. You can self-assign an alias for a more human recognisable name.

This is after Indian government asked Github to remove Bitchat within three hours after notice .

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!

How is this supposed to actually work? I'm at home, there's no bluetooth device in range, can I not send a message?

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.

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

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.

“Always connected” meshes don’t scale, but fragmented meshes that use store-and-forward for some data are workable. I’d like to see someone do this with Nostr. The main issue is that you’d have to limit the size of data in transit, so rich media is probably not realistic.

Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to.

A mesh of meshes may also be possible in theory.

ah doesn't ham-radio packet system do something like that, I only vaguely remember

but someone would have to build it into a major 3rd party firmware like openwrt to get wide adoption

the other way is using a hybrid mesh/tree system where volunteers or paid services transfer non local traffic over static links. aka the internet we have now but with a fallback layer.

I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"

And at least one comment references "Curtains for Zoosha"

It's a basic step to make a plumbis

It's 2026, learn to flimble. A plumbis won't get far in today's economy.

agentic flimble please.

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).

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...

all of them have one part thats like really famous. mac, android, webpack and bluesky are all things everyone on here knows about so anyone making jokes would get laughed out as ignorant.

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.

Radicle and Bitchat have been covered here quite a few times. These drive-by commenters (all making the same joke) come every time, and they think they’re being clever by discouraging people from looking into the product.

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.

Is it Jack Dorsey who moved the repo or someone else?

It seems like the core dev is behind this: https://x.com/callebtc/status/2080608602432082217

jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.

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.

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.

Moderation is a requirement of any platform that has user generated content. Without it they will turn to wasteland of spam and hate.

Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.

Probably on purpose. Like "Broken, But Whole"

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.

Ah yeah, that was the name. Thanks

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.

Maybe. I have bitchat installed and on in the rather large city. I have yet to see another person on :)

It's only a matter of time until it or something like it catches on as a replacement for Telegram's "People/Groups Nearby" feature that France forced it to remove.

> which is a pun on "for sex"

Where did you hear that from? Doesn't sound close at all.

Sounds pretty close (2012): https://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2012/0327/223631.shtml

i have this pet theory that it was inspired by BitchX (they prominently mention being like IRC)

Flubber is now on Bloopy.

Is this bit-chat or bitch-at?

It depends on whom you’re talking to

> It depends on whom you're bitching at

FTFY

Yes :)

Sounds like a suitable addition to the ATProto ecosystem :)

It's explicitly in opposition to ATProto. That's probably why they went with Radicle and not Tangled

It's worth noting the distinction between the auth layer and the data layer here. Tangled uses ATProto primarily for authentication, but it departs from the standard PDS model by offloading Git storage to knots.

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.

What the hell are Radicle and Tangled

https://radicle.dev/ Peer-to-peer code forge.

https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.

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

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you

Thanks for combobulating. I used to use Hackysack but I switched to Phlegm after the Unhappy Kittens controversy.

Radicle: decentralised GitHub

Tangled: centralised Radicle

Or a misspelling of bitch hat

Find out on expertsexchange.com

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.

Thanks, in a bit, I'm browsing therapistfinder.com right now.

Yep.

BitchX was already taken

Is this irc compatible?

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.

How would it be? Bitchat is for offline communication over Bluetooth Low Energy networks

only if you make it so.

Definitely! Just send a message to a given topic, it gets distributed through the mesh & users either get it or not (they are not in the mesh at the time).

Just like IRC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com