Comment by JonnyReads
7 months ago
I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
7 months ago
I don't get the hype around this. No one would be talking about it if it was released by someone who wasn't a billionaire
Whilst there are alternatives, one being Briar and there are others whose names I can't recall, it's not a flooded market, so I think it's worth some discussion.
Additionally, tools that allow communication and coordination without relying on internet or cloud-based services seem to be of increasing pertinence to the direction the world is currently going.
Re hype: that's just human reaction to any well known person's new thing. Just don't get caught up in it, discuss "thing" for "things" sake and move on.
Care for some more constructive criticism?
Maybe I'm being overly critical. But it's nothing revolutionary or new, we've had Bluetooth mesh chat for a long time. In fact I vaguely remember seeing it as someone's a university masters project over 10 years ago. I'm more interested in the lo-ra mesh, but that's probably because it feels more mysterious to me, as I have little understanding of radio networks. Let's not even get started on the name (b*tch@).
But I must admit it is cool that it's open source. I'll keep a eye out for an android app
Someone ported it to Android already. https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat-android/releas...
Nothing revolutionary but I haven't seen one with this many features.
Store and forward, E2EE, message compression, battery optimization, groups, permissions, etc.
It's pretty feature packed tbh. I think that's where the news is.
I'll ask more directly: What's the use case and/or value proposition for the average person?
I've heard about it a few times over the last 24 hours, and I'm relatively off social media, so that to me indicates a considerable buzz. But the only thing that gets headlines is "Jack did a thing!" And the readme is primarily jargon.
I can't speak for GP, but it's not clear to me _why_ it's a Really Big Deal.
For the average person, probably not much use. But we're in an interesting time where laptops and phones are ubiquitous and all of them have bluetooth. It being open source, and already ported to Android, is a bit special too. Seems like a coinflip whether it catches on, and if people start using it for concerts, festivals, group camps or whatever, then in a disaster it will already be there for people.
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Bluetooth mesh chats were quite popular and effective during the Hong Kong protests.
Aside from protests, I'd also say they could be useful during festivals and other events where mobile networks can get quite congested.
Eventually fragments of groups will pass within range, forwarding messages to the rest, useful for coordinating rendezvous.
If built into an app for the event, it would be even more effective.
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> What's the use case and/or value proposition for the average person?
Weird take. If it doesn't make sense to you, maybe it's just not for you (yet). That's not an indictment of either you, the project, or other people being excited about it. Not everything has to be targeting the lowest common denominator on launch.
Who even is "The Average Person"?
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