Yeah, fuck Jack.
Why?
Aside from the fact that he made twitter (which I blame in large part for how our political/news media landscape, as well as modern discourse, has become so thoughtless), left and made blue sky, then left blue sky and endorsed twitter?
The dude supports a ton of toxic shit and can get entirely fucked.
Lol he endorsed Twitter after leaving Bluesky? That’s an interesting series of events.
Yeah I think Twitter has been a net negative for society.
Really not interested in anything the guy with the terrible facial hair wants to make.
💯
So he took a page from Apple, copied Firechat, and will offer it to users who use Apple products. Yeah, okay, nice, I’m in.
Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.
Where my bitchat
Smack by Bitchup
Move bitch get out the way
I read it like that first and thought it was one of these illegal apps to track your partner without them knowing.
We already have Briar. I don’t get why Jack Dorsey is trying to get into the messaging space so hard. He also bankrolls SimpleX Chat if anyone is familiar with that platform
Seems rehashed, with more enshittification likely to be baked in. Typical tech bros.
Bitch@
Bitch At
Lmao
Bit chat
Bitch at
Being Jack Dorsey, I’m going with the latter.
“IRC vibes” -> maybe intended, see BitchX.
Just realized that could be read as “bit chicks”, which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.
‘Where my bitchat?’
Ive read it called bitch@
I really like this despite using nothing Apple.
Briar if you’re on Android
My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at “unknown OS FreeBSD” and doesn’t run.
Sorry, I’m not a dev on the project, just have an interest in secure communications.
Yes, I didn’t think you were, just shared … In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.
That’s what my friends and family use!
There is already a really good foss app that does exactly that, it’s called briar and is as secure and private as it gets. The downside with p2p communication apps being, that they eat your phones battery for breakfast. Still a good option for activists or journalists I think. It’s a good way to get around the “server in the middle” problem. Still more convenient to run your own (xmpp) server at home imho…
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Thanks, I did not realise that. So this app is for Mac to Mac communication only. If seems for briar you need to run a server still or messages will get lost between mobile users. How does this new app solve that problem? On mobile phones disconnects will happen regularly as network coverage changes and different network towers connect and disconnect when you are on the move. You might as well spin up your own xmpp server at that point, as that protocol is tried and tested for over 20 years and very lightweight and battery friendly as well…
One runs a mailbox app on any old disused android phone, it temporary stores content and deliver it to the main unit once the connection is restored.
Bit simpler to install an app and scan a qr code for the average user compared to even configuring an XMPP client IMO.
Neat idea 10 years ago “discovered” recently by a tech bro who thinks he’s the first one to think of it. He got his clicks, I guess.
No one has got it right yet though. Being apple only, he hasn’t either.
Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.
Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.
I mean, what is actually needed is a secure messaging app that scrapes wraps existing apps. So when two people send messages through FancyMessages, they are secure. But then if only one person has FancyMessages, and the other has Facebook messenger, then they could still comminicate - the FB user using Messenger as usual, and our hero’s FancyMessages app picking up the FB messages and passing them on through the FancyMessages UI.
This is a great idea, but it would be difficult to manage.
It reminds me of the instant messenger wars during the late 1990s/early 2000s.
AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a virtual monopoly on the industry, and so when Microsoft started breaking into it with MSN Messenger they cracked AIM’s protocol so their users could communicate with AIM users. This enraged AOL, and there was a wild cat-and-mouse updates battle for a few months. AOL would push an update to block Microsoft, then Microsoft would push an update to get around that. Sometimes there were multiple updates from both sides per day.
And then there was Trillian messenger just sneaking through the middle providing access to both, mostly unnoticed (at least for a while).
Beeper is like this, but the list of supported messaging apps is limited. It does have FB messenger though.
Signal used to work this way and I’m still mad they dropped SMS.
This is nothing like the ones you list, this is local only no internet
Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.
None of them cross the line yet to be “good enough” in practice for all the use cases of an offline messenger. Briar is probably the best, but not useful if even one of your group is on iOS.
That’s a good point. And to add to it, I’ve tried using Briar as an emergency option if there’s no Internet. And there seems to be a massive flaw in that scenario: you need the Internet to authenticate yourself on the app. So if there’s no Internet it’s useless. I just tried switching off WiFi and 5G on my phone and yup, can’t log in, so can’t use it.
And more is better so people get used to using them and skip the telcos and other stuff that can be tracked
I’m happy to see a niche decentralized thing from Jack more than if it was another commercial start-up. And I have nothing against yet another bluetooth chat. But I’m not impressed. In the whitepaper nothing is written about spam protection, so it wouldn’t work as a reliable P2P app at scale. And the UI… It’s mere a toy for Jack’s personal nostalgia about “the good old times”. And nostalgia driven development doesn’t work in general, I would say.
