Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat Becomes France’s Top Social App Amid Riots and Mobile Network Outage

“Twitter co-founder and current Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat has climbed to the number one spot in the Social Networking category of the App Store in France and also entered the top ten free apps in any category. The surge in downloads followed a nationwide cost-of-living mobilization on Saturday that saw looting and mass arrests, calls by former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal for temporary, targeted social media blocks, and a nearly ten-hour Orange mobile network outage on Wednesday.” There are quite a few apps around like this, and Briar also comes to mind, but this one is not only Bluetooth mesh networking (which hops from one phone to the next via Bluetooth), it also uses the Nostr protocol (with Tor optionally enabled too). Nostr is actually a social network that makes use of decentralised relays, and was designed to be censorship resistant. Nostr is another of Jack’s projects he is involved in, and he can be seen posting there sometimes. Both Bitchat…