I find it funny that we've had public chats for nearly 3 years and they're mostly dead, but ephemeral chats are all the rage right now. Why is that?

Replies (49)

jb55's avatar
jb55 _@jb55.com 5 months ago
yeah ephemeral chats are fleeting (by definition). even coolr.chat went dead after awhile. kind1 notes are sticky and async non-ephemeral but expiring geohash notes would be cool.
LJ's avatar
LJ 5 months ago
The same happens with Wikis
The *live* aspect of the chats is interesting. Chats that popup when something is happening. Could be interesting for events, News, Nostr drama, etc. I'm having fun with it on Amethyst already, and the new version isn't even in wide release yet. image
The Bluetooth aspect to it is curious and is quite shareable as this curious thing. So it's reaged a wider audience (ie outside the bitcointwitter bubble). It's also not totally swamped with bitcointwitter chat, slogans and 'memes'. Let's say bitchat was just the 21m room, it wouldnt be being shared, at all. If it becomes bitcoin chatrooms everywhere it'll be dead very quickly. Luckily the format of geohashes dilutes the intensity of this sort of content out.
I prefer truly ephemeral chats in most cases. Even on SimpleX and Signal—unless I'm talking to family or clients—I have notes set to disappear in 24 hours and screenshotting disabled for many (not perfect, but it's better). I feel like people can talk more freely, just like in real conversation, when they know that everything won't be easily copied, recorded, and hanging out on someone else's server somewhere.
Juls's avatar
Juls 5 months ago
Yes I couldn't agree more, the implementation in Amethyst makes a huge difference for the longevity of it, specially in the scenarios you've mentioned! Kinda feels like the chats rooms but ☄️󠄵󠅠󠅘󠅕󠅝󠅕󠅢󠅑󠅜
It does seem genuinely novel as an idea, both the Bluetooth aspect and the geohash rooms. It's easy to communicate it to your mate. It also doesn't suffer from one community totally hogging, as is arguably the case for nostr, being a bitcointwitter offshoot.
It's implementation in Amethyst is interesting.
Ryan's avatar Ryan
The *live* aspect of the chats is interesting. Chats that popup when something is happening. Could be interesting for events, News, Nostr drama, etc. I'm having fun with it on Amethyst already, and the new version isn't even in wide release yet. image
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Compare how you would describe bitchat with how you would describe nostr (microblogging clients). Amethyst is.... Like twitter but decentalised etc etc It many ways it's not really got the same novelty / shareable aspect / hook. )Plus you get here and it's just people aperging about the price of bitcoin. Lol)
'old internet' has an appeal to both young and old. Not that anyone listens to me, but bitchat forum (styles as message boards of old) fork would potentially be very popular too. Imo imo imo
Also what is like irc now. Nostr-as-microblogging is like farcaster, is like twitter, is like Bluesky is like etc etc etc. not much novelty aspect to that, not a very 'shareable down the pub' conversation point here
Bitchat (afaik) has no marketing beyond jack's tweets (you could pretty much say the same for nostrmicroblogs). But it is probably getting a lot word of mouth promotion.
I realized most of my iMessages are just living in the cloud never to be read again. We don’t have time to reread any of our old thoughts in texts.
We like the feeling of security generated by ephemeral chats. We also like the danger of public chats. 😌