It's new. People love new.
Discussion
This is the correct answer I believe.
Just like follow packs. We had them over two years ago and no one used them. That is until they were redesigned slightly and marketed differently.
It does seem genuinely novel as an idea, both the Bluetooth aspect and the geohash rooms. It's easy to communicate it to your mate.
It also doesn't suffer from one community totally hogging, as is arguably the case for nostr, being a bitcointwitter offshoot.
It's implementation in Amethyst is interesting.
Don't have this version yet. Will have to wait and see:)
Compare how you would describe bitchat with how you would describe nostr (microblogging clients).
Amethyst is.... Like twitter but decentalised etc etc
It many ways it's not really got the same novelty / shareable aspect / hook.
)Plus you get here and it's just people aperging about the price of bitcoin. Lol)
Bitch@ us like IRC. It's familiar. At least to old dudes like me that grew up on IRC in the 90s. Maybe Zoomers will like it because it's retro or new to them.
'old internet' has an appeal to both young and old.
Not that anyone listens to me, but bitchat forum (styles as message boards of old) fork would potentially be very popular too. Imo imo imo
Also what is like irc now.
Nostr-as-microblogging is like farcaster, is like twitter, is like Bluesky is like etc etc etc. not much novelty aspect to that, not a very 'shareable down the pub' conversation point here
Bitchat (afaik) has no marketing beyond jack's tweets (you could pretty much say the same for nostrmicroblogs). But it is probably getting a lot word of mouth promotion.