This would've been useful during the Iran shutdowns last week. Bluetooth mesh is one of the few things that keeps working when carriers go dark.

choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."

how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?

It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions.

Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.

The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.

I'll tell you a story.

Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.

This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.

A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.

And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.

I open bitchat once a week. Someday I’ll find someone nearby and we’ll be best friends.

Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?

Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot

Reading some comments, people do not understand.....

Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally.

Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything. If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons.

It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent. That tells you a lot.

The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.

I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi