You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.

And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...

Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.

Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.

I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.

I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)

a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384

* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.

* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.

Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146

We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.

So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.

If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.

We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.

how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?

Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.

I'll tell you a story.

Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.

This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.

A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.

And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.

Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally.

Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything. If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons.

It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent. That tells you a lot.

Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.

If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko

The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.

In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.

Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).

AFAIK, Brair relays messages through Bluetooth but also through Tor if possible.

Wifi obviously has higher bandwidth, but I guess it isn't viable as a mesh, or is there any trick with turning on/off hotspots on phones dynamically that'd make it viable? (Afaik older phones made you pick between being a hotspot or being a regular wifi client, but at least some newer ones seem to allow both simultaneously.)

I'm definitely hoping for a future with wider support for C2PA (content credentials on images) on phone cameras to make these photos power citizen journalism. So far Samsung S25 and Pixel 10 support C2PA in the camera hardware: need other phone makers (especially Apple) to get on board already... if you're an iPhone user, please help yell at Apple support etc!

Aside: I registered a domain and plan to build a citizen journalism news feed for such photos (and uncut videos). I see it as the antidote to Instagram et al's feeds that're full of AI slop (and plenty of fakery even before AI-generated imagery got big). And it's essential to truth, democracy and ultimately (maybe I'm too idealistic here) peace. Aside to the aside: wish some of us techies banded together to build "peace tech" as a new sector in tech, DM if interested in brainstorming or working together.