In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.

Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment

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maqp 7 hours ago | parent [-]

So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?

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ifwinterco 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but messages can be encrypted so relaying parties can't read them. And yes, it would have an effect on battery and have very limited bandwidth compared to whatsapp (no sharing videos etc).

Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?

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fc417fc802 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> definitely not practical for messaging

Text based messaging ala IRC? Just how quickly and how much do you type? A few hundred KiB exchanged between nodes only every 10 seconds or so ought to be able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users in most scenarios. The impact on battery life should be far less than using a bluetooth headset.

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ifwinterco 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry I should be clearer: I think it actually might be feasible in a high population density area and if everyone uses it, but because of the limited range of bluetooth you really do need a high density of active nodes for it to work reliably.

A messaging system that often takes hours or days to get messages to the receiver is fairly useless and people will continue to prefer centralised systems, so there's a severe chicken-and-egg problem to solve there before anything like this can work

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fc417fc802 6 hours ago | parent [-]

There's no reason a mesh network can't use an internet connection as a transport when it's available. Moreover a P2P capable mesh can even make use of a centralized server in such scenarios. At the end of the day it's "just" a message routing and delivery problem.

When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.

	▲	ifwinterco 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, maybe a hybrid approach could work. That's an interesting idea