Walked around Fusion Festival with Bitchat running. Saw about 20 other devices and a few messages. Nobody replied to my messages. So usage isn't zero, but 20 devices out of 80000 people isn't a lot. Most hops I saw was 2, meaning there wasn't enough density to make it any meaningful distance across the festival grounds.
People interested in BitChat should download it just so you have it in case it gets popular or you find someone to use it with. I tested it and it's surreal to text without WiFi or cellular.
Bluetooth chat apps already exist. I used a really shitty looking (but functional) one called Berkanan that I found by searching the App Store for a Bluetooth chat app to talk to friends on ryan air flights where we weren’t sitting together across Europe last year.
I remember when sending messages and files through IR was a standard default feature in (dump) phones two decades ago. It is a bit sad how technology in some ways regresses when certain anti-incentives apply.
That Radicle site design is an interesting take for a git repo platform. Good use of full width spacing, well thought out navigation, nice code rendering. I dig it.
> Messages route through nearby devices (max 7 hops)
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.
I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
For people who know what Bitchat and Radicle and GitHub and India are, though, and saw the Indian government threatened GitHub to remove Bitchat, this is news.
Radicle and Bitchat have been covered here quite a few times. These drive-by commenters (all making the same joke) come every time, and they think they’re being clever by discouraging people from looking into the product.
Note that you’ll never hear people saying “what’s a Google” (an equally ridiculous name) or jumping on some random YC startup with a silly name. It’s always the open source tech. It’s not random!
Joke’s on them anyway, I believe many users have embraced the alternate interpretation of the name. There’s a @BitchatMe_ Twitter account that covers BitChat news, for example. They’re just being annoying without any real effect.
This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different, some kind of centralized corpo dystopia. I’ve installed it!
I think radicle.dev is the software that lets you store issues and PRs inside a Git repo, and radicle.network is some kind of interface to people's hosts that run the Radicle software. Something like that?
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
the main reason they mentioned [1] for radicle.network is because their old domain radicle.xyz was blocked in some places by some lists that they think was because it may have hosted certain UGC that triggered some flags.
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
> deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
So it would be a lot clearer (read: not completely unclear), if radicle.network actually said "Radicle Explorer" somewhere. "Radicle Explorer" is a great descriptive name which instantly conveys a lot of information about what it is and does! But it doesn't appear anywhere there.
All social media is censored. If you think yours isnt, you're free to test that hypothesis by posting the N word over and over. I suspect you'll find that you get censored for doing so.
in case of old twitter, the blue checkmarks and their likeminded folx were allowed to hatespeak, "brigade", doxx, libel, call to violence, anything at all, as long as their infinite vitriol was directed at certain groups implicitly but blatantly designated as unprotected. the other side, on the other hand, was subject to "private platforms can do whatever the fuck they want" kind of moderation, where even "off-platform conduct" could get you summarily banned.
“Always connected” meshes don’t scale, but fragmented meshes that use store-and-forward for some data are workable. I’d like to see someone do this with Nostr. The main issue is that you’d have to limit the size of data in transit, so rich media is probably not realistic.
Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to.
Mesh networks don't scale beyond a few thousand nodes if the nodes move frequently. Nobody has found a way to make that work. You can push another order of magnitude if you give up on decentralisation.
It could be deliberate. Like Wechat's Chinese name is "Weixin", which is a pun on "for sex" in Mandarin (for which its "people nearby" feature originally saw heavy usage). As a decentralized social network, Bitchat might see similar usage.
Everything is pointing towards a hard "no", but I didn't dig deeper than literally read the first sentence in the README:
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.
Walked around Fusion Festival with Bitchat running. Saw about 20 other devices and a few messages. Nobody replied to my messages. So usage isn't zero, but 20 devices out of 80000 people isn't a lot. Most hops I saw was 2, meaning there wasn't enough density to make it any meaningful distance across the festival grounds.
That's already a lot for such a niche project.
Many CCCers attend Fusion.
If they care so much about availability maybe they should reconsider including libs.gms.location and be available on F-Droid (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/24907#...)
People interested in BitChat should download it just so you have it in case it gets popular or you find someone to use it with. I tested it and it's surreal to text without WiFi or cellular.
Bluetooth chat apps already exist. I used a really shitty looking (but functional) one called Berkanan that I found by searching the App Store for a Bluetooth chat app to talk to friends on ryan air flights where we weren’t sitting together across Europe last year.
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
I remember when sending messages and files through IR was a standard default feature in (dump) phones two decades ago. It is a bit sad how technology in some ways regresses when certain anti-incentives apply.
That Radicle site design is an interesting take for a git repo platform. Good use of full width spacing, well thought out navigation, nice code rendering. I dig it.
That name
Tobias Bluth vibes
IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.
Bitchat is an AOS (https://andotherstuff.org/#foundry-projects) project. Surprised, they didn't rehost it on ngit (https://gitworkshop.dev/), which is also an AOS project.
> Messages route through nearby devices (max 7 hops)
How far, realistically, could this reach using just iOS and Android devices? If each device can reach ~100m, that means you could theoretically reach somebody 700m (2.3k feet) away? Or would it be further if two devices are at the edge of their radio range?
Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.
https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773
Discussed earlier on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.
It definitely won’t.
People love pointing out the Streisand effect as though we’re still in the same social media dynamic that we were 30 or 15 years ago. Wake the fuck up.
Banning the app is 100% certainly going to reduce it all’s usage. The fact that you somehow think you could have the opposite effect is a sign that your head is buried so deep in the sand and you have no idea what the current state of the world is.
The authoritarians are winning and their censorship and propaganda has been exceptionally effective. Clinging to idealistic slogans and denying reality is a great way to accomplish nothing
Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
Did banning it cause it to get adopted even faster in India than it otherwise would have? That seems like the salient point to me for the Indian government’s calculus. I don’t have a particularly good feel for Indian society but my prior is that this kind of official friction puts a pretty low hard cap on how popular an app can get. If the realistic ambition was only ever to reach a small circle of activists and nerds then sure, this event probably helped the app reach those people faster.
I dont have data for any country, but if anything banning it from github gave it visibility (I personally learnt of it because of that). I don't think that banning it from github hurts its distribution really because I do not expect github to be the channel it gets popularised through as opposed to social media, in which case where the source code is hosted does not really matter. If it gets banned from the app stores, though, it will be a different issue that will definitely hurt.
We both know systems are more complex than # of downloads. In this case, the ban was a sign of weakness the establishment of the government and Github and definitely their control was weakened, which is the opposite of their goal of maintaining control, so it did not have the desired effect.
Likely faster than it would've otherwise but not likely as fast as it needs to to succeed. Similar to when Twitter got bought out and then Musk banned people who linked their Mastodon. It certainly helped Mastodon in the short term but likely hurt it in the long term
That's exactly why we fight back harder and do not bury our heads in the sand or anywhere else.
This website is called Hacker News. It's not called Authoritarian Cuck News.
It's genuinely hard to tell if this comment is satire or not.
HN is widely known for being the home of the technocrat corporate bootlicker. Very little of the hacker ethos ever gets espoused here.
The Streisand effect only works for things people are interested in to begin with. People love embarrassing photos about celebrities so it works great on those. "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture." Oops, you've already lost everyone.
Also it works if you can still actually install it. If they ban it from the app store in ios, there is no practical way people can install it on iphones. But if it is just github, it does not really create much of an issue (people found another hosting platform).
When people talk about the Streisand Effect, they usually refer to content that someone wants to disappear entirely, not merely lower its usage.
In that regard the effect is effective in making sure bitchat cannot vanish from the internet.
We can argue that overall usage of it might still go down, but I don't think anyone was arguing that.
Yo where's my
I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.
And I thought Poob already had it for you.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
For people who know what Bitchat and Radicle and GitHub and India are, though, and saw the Indian government threatened GitHub to remove Bitchat, this is news.
I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"
And at least one comment references "Curtains for Zoosha"
it's just two recent examples (Gleam on Tangled and now Bitchat on Radicle) and they're both the same format.
[Some well-liked but niche tech] switched their code forge to [a decentralized code forge].
Tbh I'm surprised how many on HN seem unfamiliar with Tangled and Radicle (and Bitchat and Gleam).
Radicle and Bitchat have been covered here quite a few times. These drive-by commenters (all making the same joke) come every time, and they think they’re being clever by discouraging people from looking into the product.
Note that you’ll never hear people saying “what’s a Google” (an equally ridiculous name) or jumping on some random YC startup with a silly name. It’s always the open source tech. It’s not random!
Joke’s on them anyway, I believe many users have embraced the alternate interpretation of the name. There’s a @BitchatMe_ Twitter account that covers BitChat news, for example. They’re just being annoying without any real effect.
Here's some less popular posts in the past year that people didn't make Poob jokes about:
* Gemini is now on Mac
* OpenClaw is now on Android
* Instapaper is now on Kobo
* Gitzy is now on Testflight
* Webpack is now on Bluesky
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
It's a basic step to make a plumbis
It's 2026, learn to flimble. A plumbis won't get far in today's economy.
Are there any special features comparing with other decentrilized message product? Such as Nostr or XMTP？
Works over Bluetooth mesh offline and Nostr online.
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
What a bunch of clickbaity nonsense.
Indian government*. They shut off internet access and order people to remove stuff all the time. Nobody pays any attention to them.
It's still up on Github. https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
Yes, it's in the first paragraph of https://bitchat.free/.
Is it Jack Dorsey who moved the repo or someone else?
It seems like the core dev is behind this: https://x.com/callebtc/status/2080608602432082217
This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different, some kind of centralized corpo dystopia. I’ve installed it!
I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.
Radicle contributor here.
It's the same project. radicle.dev is for the protocol, radicle.network is for the network explorer.
Note that that radicle.network is a static site that you can also self host: https://radicle.network/nodes/rosa.radicle.network/rad:z4V1s...
I'm pretty sure that's the same project.
I assumed they are the same :-O
One seems to be built on top of the other? Very confusing though, I agree.
I found https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
It sounds like both are the same project, one is the “explorer” which is on a different domain so that censoring it doesn’t impact the main site
I think radicle.dev is the software that lets you store issues and PRs inside a Git repo, and radicle.network is some kind of interface to people's hosts that run the Radicle software. Something like that?
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
https://radicle.network/principles
the main reason they mentioned [1] for radicle.network is because their old domain radicle.xyz was blocked in some places by some lists that they think was because it may have hosted certain UGC that triggered some flags.
> Content about Radicle (explainers, guides, download links, blog posts) which is under control of the Radicle team. We will use radicle.dev for these purposes.
> Content on Radicle (repositories hosted on practically any node on the network) which the Radicle team has only very little control over, accessible via Radicle Explorer. Going forward, our deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
> The idea is of course that if there are complaints about or issues with radicle.network in the future, we hope that radicle.dev stays largely unaffected and people can continue to inform themselves about Radicle and learn how to set it up.
On a semi-related note, this is a good time to remind anyone that hasn't yet heard of the Public Suffix List (PSL) [2][3] to make sure you put your domains that may be hosting UGC in the form <usercontent>.<yourdomain>.<tld> (ie: eTLDs) on that list so browsers and other block lists are aware that the user provisioned subdomains are UGC and not from your site so it properly isolates cookies/site grouping and won't flag your entire domain as malicious.
1: https://radicle.dev/2026/04/23/domain-move
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
3: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list
> deployment of Radicle Explorer will not be hosted on app.radicle.xyz anymore, but instead it will be hosted at radicle.network.
So it would be a lot clearer (read: not completely unclear), if radicle.network actually said "Radicle Explorer" somewhere. "Radicle Explorer" is a great descriptive name which instantly conveys a lot of information about what it is and does! But it doesn't appear anywhere there.
What if you disagree with the centralisation of the internet into some guy's suffix list?
Yes, I think it’s like a decentralized GitHub?
In theory, this could work.
Setup machine with bluetooth receiver.
Funnel packets from Bluetooth receiver over a virtual private network (ie, wireguard, tailscale, netbird).
Then in another state/country/continent with server connected to vpn then rebroadcasts those packets over BLE.
A mesh network overlayed on top of another mesh network.
jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.
All social media is censored. If you think yours isnt, you're free to test that hypothesis by posting the N word over and over. I suspect you'll find that you get censored for doing so.
in case of old twitter, the blue checkmarks and their likeminded folx were allowed to hatespeak, "brigade", doxx, libel, call to violence, anything at all, as long as their infinite vitriol was directed at certain groups implicitly but blatantly designated as unprotected. the other side, on the other hand, was subject to "private platforms can do whatever the fuck they want" kind of moderation, where even "off-platform conduct" could get you summarily banned.
Dorsey's legacy is promoting cryptocurrency. Censorship is part-and-parcel with owning any social media.
I wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
btw what's the current state of mesh wifi?
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
“Always connected” meshes don’t scale, but fragmented meshes that use store-and-forward for some data are workable. I’d like to see someone do this with Nostr. The main issue is that you’d have to limit the size of data in transit, so rich media is probably not realistic.
Think FIDO protocol rather than the always-on internet we’re accustomed to.
A mesh of meshes may also be possible in theory.
Mesh networks don't scale beyond a few thousand nodes if the nodes move frequently. Nobody has found a way to make that work. You can push another order of magnitude if you give up on decentralisation.
Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.
i have this pet theory that it was inspired by BitchX (they prominently mention being like IRC)
Probably on purpose. Like "Broken, But Whole"
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is the title of a video game, because it's South Park and they do that sort of thing.
Ah yeah, that was the name. Thanks
It could be deliberate. Like Wechat's Chinese name is "Weixin", which is a pun on "for sex" in Mandarin (for which its "people nearby" feature originally saw heavy usage). As a decentralized social network, Bitchat might see similar usage.
Maybe. I have bitchat installed and on in the rather large city. I have yet to see another person on :)
Is this bit-chat or bitch-at?
Yes :)
Find out on expertsexchange.com
Have you ever heard of the rather excellent Pen Island, vendors of fine pens? On my work computer, so you can plumb the internet archive for yourself.
Thanks, in a bit, I'm browsing therapistfinder.com right now.
Sounds like a suitable addition to the ATProto ecosystem :)
It's explicitly in opposition to ATProto. That's probably why they went with Radicle and not Tangled
What the hell are Radicle and Tangled
They're curtains for Zoosha. An alternative to Poob (which is now on Pheebo).
EDIT: sorry I felt too bad not to leave an explanation
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/curtains-for-zoosha
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poob-has-it-for-you
Thanks for combobulating. I used to use Hackysack but I switched to Phlegm after the Unhappy Kittens controversy.
https://radicle.dev/ Peer-to-peer code forge.
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
Radicle: decentralised GitHub
Tangled: centralised Radicle
Or a misspelling of bitch hat
BitchX was already taken
Yep.
It depends on whom you’re talking to
> It depends on whom you're bitching at
FTFY
Is this irc compatible?
Everything is pointing towards a hard "no", but I didn't dig deeper than literally read the first sentence in the README:
> A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app with dual transport architecture: local Bluetooth mesh networks for offline communication and internet-based Nostr protocol for global reach. No accounts, no phone numbers, no central servers. It's the side-groupchat.
How would it be? Bitchat is for offline communication over Bluetooth Low Energy networks
only if you make it so.