Funny enough, bitchat should just drop the bluetooth stuff that rarely works and focus on topical and geolocated chats over nostr.
Discussion
Which basically is what everyone is using anyways rn
Maybe the blue tooth is an excuse to keep the Internet of things working under the guise of communication for plebs.
Open all the doors to secure your privacy.
Not forcing users to turn on bluetooth would be good too
yes, it's on the todo list. please help and open a PR to fix it, or at least an issue to track it
In grapheneos the bluetooth shuts off after so many minutes. It requires you to contantly reapprove. Makes app nearly unusable.
None of my graphene. Which device are you using?
Pixel 6a 🙏
Is this behaviours documented somewhere? Maybe nostr:npub1hxx76n82ags8jrduk0p3gqrfyqyaxnrlnynu9p5rt2vmwjq6ts3q4sg75y knows?
Bluetooth automatically deactivates on a configurable timer when there has been $TIME without an active connection to it. It's an attack surface reduction feature
i actually think it’s great for in person events especially music festivals. I never have service at festivals and often lose my friends. I already have my friends ready to use bitchat for next years music festival. It’s genius
Bluetooth for a chat is really a bad thing. It has so many attack vectors. And what is the reason for Bluetooth anyway? In that distance I can talk to a person in meat space.
Replace it with existent Meshnetwork tschnologies would be a good way.
which attack vectors?
I had no problem when testing Bitchat with my two Android devices.
Armageddon chat and bitchat
Mesh seems to be the hook that got people excited. I’ve spoken to multiple people at random geos who thought it was still over Bluetooth and remarking how amazing it was.
full circle, nostr activity will become the reason why people join the mesh
Have to disagree here.
Public geo channels are nice and get people engaged, but we already had public channels before.
The real innovation is mesh chat.
🫂
I don't disagree. But "real innovation" is irrelevant if nobody finds a good use for it and just use the global thing that is available. I have tried in some small events with friends. It's rough.
Fair point about the current UX of bitch@ but I don’t think it’s going to stay that way forever.
What is more likely to happen is that the app becomes transport agnostic eventually, be it Bluetooth, LoraWAN, nostr relays or whatever.
why not just have both?
Hard disagree here. We don’t need p2p communication to work because meshnets are cool, we need this because our sovereignty ultimately depends upon it.
agree
we're going to do the opposite and prioritize bluetooth mesh. that's the innovative part.
It sure is innovative. But are people actually using it? Or do they just want a relay-based chat?
I find bitcoin, nostr and now bitchat interesting, particularly because they are all (hopefully) being built and made robust for necessary use cases on the edges of existence.
i use the bluetooth part it is very useful
Yes, they are
For me the only value of bitchat is the bluetooth part since that means it can be used in no internet situations. I dont actively use it since location based nostr sounds like a bad idea to me. But its in my emergency kit.
When wi-fi mesh?
Seems harder, not to open API
Wi-fi mesh is the holy grail of p2p ranged comms. Trust yall galaxy devs will figure it out 💪
would it make sense to look into #meshtastic? Could be another useful transport layer. https://meshtastic.org/
Meshtastic is great, however my understanding is that it requires special hardware few have.
On the other hand there are six - seven billion mobile devices with wi-fi that people have at home, work, in their pocket.
Yep, meshtastic needs extra hardware, but can do good distance. However, not as a replacement for BT or WiFi more like an extra option.
Yeah, it does require specific devices. However, the upside to it is that it can go way farther than Bluetooth.
I had my node here in my window and was talking with a router 200 feet on a tower from a couple of miles away. And there's another guy in my area who had his node up on a 30 foot flagpole and was talking to the router from 17 and a half miles away. Bluetooth just cannot do that.
About the maximum you're going to get with a 7-hop Bluetooth mesh is about a mile. In meshtastic, it can be several hundred miles.
I’m all for meshtastic, and all too aware of the challenges of bluetooth.
I am advocating for a wi-fi mesh network, which seems like a sweet spot between meshtastic and bluetooth radios.
Yeah, if Wi-Fi direct can be used, I think that would be a good middle point because it's got bigger range than Bluetooth, but it's still not super crazy.
Exactly! Bit was was "messages without servers" then they removed the "without servers part" and is just a unencrypted messenger. I'd rather use simplex or signal
It should for sure be able to use the nostr chats without turning on Google gps service. Just let me teleport.
I think the main idea behind doing that was to get people using the app and talking with each other and then once the region channel got too big you would step down to a more local channel and once that got too big you would step down to an even more local channel until eventually you got to the point where you were actually doing the mesh without the internet at all.
So you would go from a channel containing everybody within 1,250 kilometers, to containing everybody within 500 kilometers, to containing everybody within 500 kilometers, to containing everybody within 5 kilometers, etc., until eventually you got so close that you could just use the mesh over Bluetooth.