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Comment by freehorse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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