favoriting someone you meet on bitchat in person is a form of “proof of personhood”. a potential way to rebuild the internet with more clarity around who is real versus bot
bitchat 1.2.0 (purple) shipping to testflight tonight.
this enables mutual favorites to automatically switch to a nostr-based transport when one of them leaves the mesh. only for private messages for now using NIP-17.
basically people can bitchat in person, favorite each other at that time, and then can continue the conversation if internet is available through nostr, from any distance. no need to input a npub or know anything about nostr. it just works.
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/pull/358
Discussion
I never even thought of this, but this is actually amazing and does two things:
1) “you may not know this person, but 15 others in his/her local area have validated he/she is a real person”.
2) this establishes the precedent of an internet protocol for turning each person’s local community into a baseline for how the internet functions
And it does these things while maintaining anonymity and decentralization. Locals can vet you, but they can’t deny you access.
#bitchat #futuresystems #decentralization #localcommunities