If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?

No they sadly don't have that, and that's the major issue of connectivity. All chat recipients have to be online/reachable to receive your messages, which is okay, but useless in mobile environments where you can't afford that constant traffic.

The broadcast type channels though are what the article talks about, they are great for off the grid and mesh environments.

Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.

For these types of NAT breaking issues, a lot of protocols rely on STUN/TURN/TURTLE routing.

For my experimental software router I'm relying on broken firewall deep packet inspection, so I'm using exfil / smuggling protocols. Currently still works, according to my local setup of the great firewall (it's source leak was legit btw).

Jodel is a successor to yik-yak.

A good use of briar is having it on your phone already so that during a natural disaster you can connect with others that already have it at community relief spots. Keep it just in case and it will come in clutch when you need it most!

Just the layout seems so awful. As if noboy ever optimised this for real people.

Meshtastic also struggles with high density and high traffic networks. Some modifications can be made to work better, but with the default settings it really grinds to a halt, and modifying the settings to be better suited requires some expertise and foresight. It works amazingly in off grid, relatively sparse networks, but it's got some major limitations.

Boo, native apps.

Could be useful in Bangladesh and Baluchistan too.

Bitchat seems like a good solution. It will be even more effective once Bluetooth 6 becomes more widespread in a year or two.

I'm not sure so many Iranians have $1000 iphones to use hipster bitchat; cheaper android clients are more the norm.

Dude.

Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline.

There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough.

The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle.

Have seen horror stories.

They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night.

Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.

"Raliv, Tsaliv ya Galiv" didn't need the internet or fancy mesh networking - rabble-rousing Friday mosque-sessions were sufficient for ethnociding the native population over the course of many centuries.

What's wrong with it?

I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.

I doubt iOS has a large market share in Iran.

Also, for something like this you don't want a platform that requires you to essentially use the App Store and nothing else.

   Briar is available on Google Play for devices running Android.

10% of devices or less.

Unfortunately, due to safety reasons Apple cannot allow you to leave the walled garden, it is only in your own best interest. All communication services on our iOS devices require at least one US-based NSA-integrated middleman. /s

https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.

Do you think the govt will not force Google to revoke developer certs once developer verification is in place to prevent sideloading or not order Google/Apple to forcibly uninstall them ?

These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.

The military can very easily find and eliminate repeaters very quickly and almost certainly would.

Meshtastic is both extremely range limited and trivial to DDOS. It's a fun toy protocol but it's not resistant to nation state disruption at all.

I looked a bit into meshtastic and was told that if a node was physically compromised then messages could be intercepted. That cant be right, right?