Last weekend I touching grass and mud at 18th edition of Off Festival in Katowice. Knowing that mobile Internet often does not work well on such events I thought it was the best opportunity to test Bitchat and see how Bluetooth mesh works in real world scenario where it actually can be the best way to communicate.

Setup

I onboarded 4 of my friends to Bitchat. They were not not heavily focused or motivated on testing Bitchat — they eagerly downloaded it expecting that Signal (our usual communication tool) may not work due to mobile network overload.

One of my friends also onboarded a couple of people from a different group of friends. I do not know how big was the group onboarded by her. I never met those people in person.

Initial testing was promising — at the hotel before the festival started, we successfully connected to each other and tested that the chat works.

While walking at Katowice main train station, I opened Bitchat and even spotted someone in the chat outside of our group. Was that one of the guys onboarded by my friend? Or someone else trying the app? I will never know :)

At the Festival

The festival began and we started to attend concerts we cared about. I personally had an amazing time seeing Os Mutantes, James Blake, Have a Nice Life, Kraftwerk and Fountains D.C. live. We often split to see our favourite artists and then were trying to find each other out later, at the next concert.

As I assumed, mobile Internet was not working most of the time. Signal messages were not sent out and were not received most of the time, unless you happened to be in a spot where it clicked and got online. So naturally me and my friends started to check regularly Bitchat to see If we can communicate this way.



Unfortunately, this hasn't work out as expected. We ran into some serious connectivity issues:

• Often me or one or more of my friends did not see each other in the chat, even though we were fairly close to each other (same concert).

• Often we we could see each other connect and join the chat, but one side couldn't see messages sent by the other, while the other could see all of them. I often see people "connected" but then never see a message from them in that session, even though they were sending some.

• Outside of the hotel test and a few other times where we checked Bitchat literally sitting next to each other, we didn't manage to communicate and find each other in a situation where it actually could be useful.

Now I it's hard for me to identify the reason behind those issues. Are those natural issues with Bluetooth mesh? Were people's Bluetooth devices like headphones interfering with our Bluetooth mesh connectivity? Could Bitchat implementation of the technology be improved and solve those, or it's already "maxing out" the possibilities? Maybe Bluetooth mesh is just too weak and not good enough for such scenario?

Now I need to add here that those issues arose regardless of what phones we were using. Both iPhone to iPhone and iPhone to Android were not working great and as expected.

Having problems with even proximity connectivity, I don't think we have successfully utilised mesh connection where one node relays messages to the other.

During the 3 days of the festival several times I've seen people joining the chat that were not my friends. It happened 3-4 times. I think only 2 times I've seen a message back from those strangers, before never seeing them again. I don't know If they were quickly leaving the chat, messaging me and I couldn't see it or was there some other reason?

It also made me hard to judge how big the connectivity range of this thing is. Bluetooth 5 which my iPhone 13 has, supposedly should have a reach of 243 metres. I get that a big group of people around, as well as other obstacles, most likely shrink that area considerably. We definitely had issues with 100m, 50m and sometimes less, so I think the signal itself was not the core of the problem.

At some point I realised I see phones connected to my phone's Bluetooth. When I checked this, I haven't seen any of online peers in Bitchat. Was it apps fault, that the device sees other devices, but I cannot reach them in the app? Or was my phone catching all the random phones bluetooth around?

It was also hard to me to judge when the app stops looking for peers. Does it need to be active all the time? It seemed to still scann when you minimize the app (it's not active on your phone screen), but after some time (5-10m?) drop this until you open it again. Those are just assumptions, I don't know exactly how it worked and when stopped. Another question is If "low power mode" affected bluetooth reach or strength? Then of course there are differences between iPhone and Android architecture and how they handle apps and Bluetooth. Lots of questions, little answers.

Summary

To sum up, Bitchat failed to provide a useful communication in festival setup. I couldn't identify the core issue — is it Bluetooth mesh technology itself or is it how Bitchat handles it?

On the third day of the festival, my friends were not so eager to test Bitchat anymore. After some time seeing the app does not help us really, we defaulted to use SMS when the Internet did not work. SMS worked. In the end they didn't care about testing some niche cool technology, they were interested in an app that will work where others do not. It's not in this state yet.

However, I definitely could see huge potential in this and having this impromptu friends/festival chat that works offline. It can create spontaneous, unique human connections. In the festival setup, it can create a simple, public chat that can be utilised by you and your friends and create new interactions with people around you don't know. Maybe some stranger in the chat has a paracetamol to help you with the headache? Maybe someone is at the beginning of beer queue and can buy you a beer for sats? I love the minimalist design and simplicity of the architecture and app assumptions. I hope those issues can be improved and I can test it next year with more success. I also expect it will become a standard "group chat" during bitcoin events, where much more heavy testing will happen, which will hopefully result in improving what we have and making it an excellent communication tool.

Given the nature of mesh networks, It may also be true that with just a little bit of more people eagerly using Bitchat around us, the whole system would work better for all of us. Maybe If we had 2 or 3 more groups of friends using the app, it would all work great. So there is a bit of initial network effect needed, even If it's just a temporary network you assemble.

Kudos to nostr:nprofile1qyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvqyehwumn8ghj7mnhvvh8qunfd4skctnwv46z7ctewe4xcetfd3khsvrpdsmk5vnsw96rydr3v4jrz73hvyu8xqpqsg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q8dzj6n , nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpzemhxue69uhks6tnwshxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qpq2rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sugh36r and other contributors working on the project. I hope my report will provide you valuable info for further work.