Announcing Dipity! TL;DR, it's a bluetooth mesh chat app built for local communities, not protests. You can get it on zapstore, google play, and soon the apple store (Lord willing). Last summer, I was sitting at a coffee shop chatting with a friend about creating a bluetooth mesh app, inspired by Manyverse (a scuttlebutt app). The local-first architecture is what originally got me interested in this whole space, and yet I'd never tried building on it. Less than a week later, Bitchat came out, which took the wind out of my sails. Since then, Bitchat has seen meteoric growth, topping app store charts and making international headlines. Which is great! But I also have a few problems with it. First, its primary metaphor is chat, which might be useful for some cases (like protests), but is near worthless for slower-paced async communication — think concert announcements, garage sales, lost and found, etc. Second, it's vanilla nostr — messages are signed, and geohash rooms are accessible from anywhere. There are no real barriers to communication across space. James Carey (no, not that one) talks in his book "Communication as Culture" about time-binding vs space-binding media. Time-binding media create continuity over time, while space-binding media create continuity over space. The trade-off of each is discontinuity over the other axis. We see this is the rise of "horizontal" identities (race, class, gender) over "vertical" identities (nationality, regionalism, home town pride) in tandem with the rise of space-binding media like the internet. I want to see if I can fight the inherent tendencies of digital media to accelerate communication and erode local identities by using it in a new way. Dipity is anti-efficient; it uses bluetooth and nostr with a new signature scheme to promote verifiability across only two hops. (In theory, this could be short circuited by placing a relay in between, or by passing along proofs, but assuming buy-in from users, the network can suppress illicit gossip.) The goal of this is to create a local-only, human-scale gossip network that supports the formation of organic, rooted communities. I don't know if this project will work, but I think it's interesting and worth a try. Until the iOS version is out, I don't recommend trying to onboard your local community, since network effect is key (unless your locale uses Android exclusively). But please give it a try and let me know what you think!

Zapstore

Dipity — Zapstore

A community board that trades posts with phones nearby over Bluetooth, built on nostr.