Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has announced bitchat, a new experimental peer-to-per messaging app that doesn’t require the internet or even an account to work. Here’s the idea behind it.
Protocols, not platforms
Ever since TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick released his 2019 paper “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech,” Jack Dorsey seems to have truly taken it to heart.
That paper led Dorsey to launch the Bluesky project within Twitter (before it was spun out as its own thing), and he’s since become one of the strongest advocates for the idea that open protocols, rather than proprietary platforms, are the key to enabling competition and giving users control over speech and privacy.
After handing the Twitter reins to Parag Agrawal just before the Musk acquisition and the X rebrand, Dorsey joined Bluesky’s board, though he’s since left that too. He also founded Damus, a completely separate decentralized social network.
Still, the protocols idea seems to have stuck and, over the weekend, he unveiled his latest crack at it: bitchat.
my weekend project to learn about bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things.
bitchat: bluetooth mesh chat…IRC vibes.
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