I haven't found any discussion of this new app on this sub or the other prepper subs, so I wonder how many people have heard of Bitchat and what you have to say about it.
What I know atm: If you've heard of meshtastic and mesh networks, Bitchat seems to be the new noob-friendly version of that. It's a way to create a resilient text-only communication network through bluetooth without internet or servers. With enough people on the network, you could in theory communicate across entire towns or cities, as long as there's a chain of other people on the network between you and your recipient within bluetooth distance, for free, without internet, albeit very slowly. It allows both public chatrooms and direct encrypted communication. It was made by Jack Dorsey the same tech guy who made Twitter and Bluesky.
I know basically no more than this and what's on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat
official site: https://bitchat.free/
Subreddit which is not very active: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitchat/
I wanted to bring more eyes to it. I'm especially interested in takes from people who might be more tech savvy than me. Noob-friendliness has a lot of advantages for widespread adoption, but I'm curious if there are drawbacks.
Also, before anyone else mentions it and just to put it out there: I agree. "Bitch At"? Terrible name, wtf Dorsey. Didn't even try capitalising as BitChat! Straight up Bitchat.
BT range is extremely short. This is more sms at a festival than a town level.
It's a cute toy but so is meshtastic for that matter.
If you want solid preppers coms you get your ham lic.
Yeah l, I bought a heap of meshtastic nodes. Put an antenna way up, even got the 1 watt node for a repeater.... range is very meh.
5 watts ham APRS smokes all these LoRa boards. Actually useful
I can tell farther than Bluetooth's range
Meshtastic is a lot like the baofengs. A hit the influencers but still a pile of junk.
Dont get me wrong LoRa ARPS with a little bit of power 25w is phenomenal. 12db of gain at the antenna does not hurt either.
People don't understand we have a fairly dense network of APRS a lot of it on hardened commercial sites that's been in use and been refined for 30+ years.
I found a map of BitChat nodes on the internet. Frankly, the results are very similar to what I got with Meshtastic. The nearest node to my current location is several miles away. I am in the city right now. My bug-out location is tens of miles away from the nearest node. Bluetooth range is only about 10 meters (30 feet), which makes this a bit unrealistic. There is no way we can use it in a disaster.
I'll try it. Bridgefy wasn't working well last time I tried.
I can honestly say, I have never heard of that. Probably at my age, won't bother to learn either LOL
Pretty cool concept imo, but like other decentralized messaging apps (briar, delta, etc) they're only useful if there are enough others nearby using them as well. If you're in an apartment or have family close by, might be worth it to set up as yet another backup comms channel.
The Zello PTT app is also worth looking into, it still requires some sort of connectivity, but the messages take far less bandwidth than a traditional call/text, might be able to get messages through when connectivity is intermittent (and you can also register/set up groups for specific people, unlike the anonymity of bitchat, but that may have a different benefit, similar to HAM waves where comms are public but anyone can communicate)