Thanks for combobulating. I used to use Hackysack but I switched to Phlegm after the Unhappy Kittens controversy.
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
Radicle: decentralised GitHub
Tangled: centralised Radicle
dmboyd•Jul 25, 2026
Or a misspelling of bitch hat
logicchains•Jul 25, 2026
Find out on expertsexchange.com
all2•Jul 25, 2026
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.
subscribed•Jul 25, 2026
Thanks, in a bit, I'm browsing therapistfinder.com right now.
HumblyTossed•Jul 25, 2026
Yep.
xyst•Jul 25, 2026
BitchX was already taken
orliesaurus•Jul 25, 2026
Is this irc compatible?
embedding-shape•Jul 25, 2026
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.
culi•Jul 25, 2026
How would it be? Bitchat is for offline communication over Bluetooth Low Energy networks
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
only if you make it so.
ck2•Jul 25, 2026
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
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
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.
imtringued•Jul 25, 2026
I hope they will enjoy fighting with https://radicle.dev/ over the project name.
lostmsu•Jul 25, 2026
One seems to be built on top of the other? Very confusing though, I agree.
IshKebab•Jul 25, 2026
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.
Such a terrible name. Can't believe marketing didn't catch it.
culi•Jul 25, 2026
Probably on purpose. Like "Broken, But Whole"
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
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.
culi•Jul 25, 2026
Ah yeah, that was the name. Thanks
logicchains•Jul 25, 2026
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.
subscribed•Jul 25, 2026
Maybe. I have bitchat installed and on in the rather large city. I have yet to see another person on :)
dmix•Jul 25, 2026
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.
guess_who_is_it•Jul 25, 2026
jack promoted censorship when he was in twitter, now he is playing the saint card.
bigyabai•Jul 25, 2026
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.
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
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.
vitalyan8184•Jul 25, 2026
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 obviously 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.
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.
allthetime•Jul 25, 2026
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.
gritzko•Jul 25, 2026
I think FireChat was the first one, in 2011.
freehorse•Jul 25, 2026
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.
thisisnotauser•Jul 25, 2026
I love these posts, every week it's "Gloop is now on Ploof!"
TaupeRanger•Jul 25, 2026
And at least one comment references "Curtains for Zoosha"
fooker•Jul 25, 2026
It's a basic step to make a plumbis
Avicebron•Jul 25, 2026
It's 2026, learn to flimble. A plumbis won't get far in today's economy.
culi•Jul 25, 2026
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).
culi•Jul 25, 2026
Here's some less popular posts in the past year that people didn't make Poob jokes about:
I can’t wait until Goblin is acquired by Nematode. Then finally they might make Gorbachev open source.
ronsor•Jul 25, 2026
And I thought Poob already had it for you.
Too many proper nouns in titles.
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
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.
xyst•Jul 25, 2026
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.
momentmaker•Jul 25, 2026
For some context, it seems like the Indian government wants Bitchat to be taken down.
Surely this won't have the opposite effect that they're looking for.
nfbdhdfbf•Jul 25, 2026
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
qphe95•Jul 25, 2026
Well banning it pushed it to Radicle and now people are moving to GitHub alternatives so I think the Streisand effect worked.
mastax•Jul 25, 2026
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.
culi•Jul 25, 2026
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
freehorse•Jul 25, 2026
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.
wat10000•Jul 25, 2026
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.
freehorse•Jul 25, 2026
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).
ranger_danger•Jul 25, 2026
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.
> 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?
mkayokay•Jul 25, 2026
Had the same question then read the whitepaper (section 6).
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.
Qision•Jul 25, 2026
That's already a lot for such a niche project.
inigyou•Jul 25, 2026
Many CCCers attend.
RobRivera•Jul 25, 2026
That name
Tobias Bluth vibes
bad_username•Jul 25, 2026
IKR? "Where's your Bitchat?" is a question better never uttered to anyone in person.
Mistletoe•Jul 25, 2026
This is the cyberpunk future I was hoping we would get…and we got something completely different. I’ve installed it!
21 Comments
Relevant discussion yesterday:
> “Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
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
FTFY
https://tangled.org/ Code forge based on AT Protocol.
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
Tangled: centralised Radicle
> 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.
seems like after November or January 2029 might need it since administration now has a kill-switch so why wouldn't they use it
I agree it's super confusing though and their explanation isn't exactly clear:
https://radicle.network/principles
> 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
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
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 wouldn't worry about people going sweet on him anytime soon.
[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).
* 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...
Too many proper nouns in titles.
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.
https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2080565084586135773
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
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036433
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?
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/blob/main/WHIT...
Tobias Bluth vibes