messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks. No internet
So he's made a shitty version of Briar and crammed crypto into it?
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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(4 replies)
Let's build an app to liberate communications but only release it inside a closed garden. Great idea
I don't trust Jack. But this does seem marginally interesting. Actually decentralized, no servers supposedly. We'll have to see. Again I sure as hell I'm not going to trust dorsey. And he's got it under some cringey edgelord "unlicense" license which basically appears to be MIT just with a different name. The actual concept seems intriguing. But definitely nothing to get excited about currently.
youtube-dl and yt-dlp are under unlicense. it's just boilerplate legalese for public domain
And he's got it under some cringey edgelord "unlicense" license which basically appears to be MIT just with a different name.
Bro, Public Domain.
He used different terms in different places. And to be frank, I'm not sure I'd heard about unlicense before. But upon closer look it does seem to be a the goal. Despite not being valid or applicable in a few jurisdictions.
https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html
https://opensource.org/license/unlicense
these two institutions endorse the license
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(1 replies)
From the description it seems to be rather clean. And perhaps not to be limited to Apple for too long.
Bit chat
Bitch at
Being Jack Dorsey, I'm going with the latter.
Ive read it called bitch@
'Where my bitchat?'
"IRC vibes" -> maybe intended, see BitchX.
Just realized that could be read as "bit chicks", which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.
I wanted something like this for weddings or group camping type events for sharing photos to multiple others at once.
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(9 replies)
He should try a cheeseburger once in awhile.
So he took a page from Apple, copied Firechat, and will offer it to users who use Apple products. Yeah, okay, nice, I’m in.
Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.
Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.
This is nothing like the ones you list, this is local only no internet
Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.
And more is better so people get used to using them and skip the telcos and other stuff that can be tracked
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I mean...I guess thanks for the stepping off point? Android has the Briar Project, which couldn't be distributed for iOS due to Apple's license fuckery. I'm at least curious enough to look through this and see what they've done different.
I think the most useless part of this is using BT only which has a range of what...40ft?
It's definitely limiting. LoRa wan meshed network is more useful. But most people don't have a LoRa capable device. I could see something like this at a protest or public event at least. If there were enough nodes in the area the network could span hundreds to thousands of feet with the right conditions. But that's a big ask ATM.
Meshtastic requires bespoke hardware, it’ll always stay a marginal tool
This requires: an iPhone.
And someone will make a bridge from this to Meshtastic in a while anyway
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(1 replies)
This reminds me of the times I was saving text files on my phone and sending them to random classmates, which makes me think that if two people (especially between iOS and Android) want to communicate in BT, there is no need for a third party app.
Well that's odd, on the apple App Store there is a 4 year old Social Networking app called BitChat, that appears to mostly be in Japanese. I think I'll stick with Signal.
I really like this despite using nothing Apple.
Briar if you're on Android
My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at "unknown OS FreeBSD" and doesn't run.
Sorry, I'm not a dev on the project, just have an interest in secure communications.
Yes, I didn't think you were, just shared ... In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.
Briar is the much better and much more mature version of this.
I actually liked the way this particular thing works, I've visited the repository and it's much like a real version of my toy of two months. (Except my toy doesn't work for anything real)
That's what my friends and family use!
Really not interested in anything the guy with the terrible facial hair wants to make.
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(1 replies)