FireChat was a tool for revolution, then disappeared

Hi there, I am on developement team of Newnode, a successor of FireChat founded by two of the same people (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;</a>). We now provide both, a VPN and a Messenger, with purpose to help people evade censorship and enable device-to-device connectivity. You can find the source code at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clostra&#x2F;newnode">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;clostra&#x2F;newnode</a>

&gt; Then, one day in February 2020, as COVID-19 swept the globe, access to FireChat was completely cut off without explanation.<p>If it could be shut off from one place like that, it doesn&#x27;t sound very &quot;decentralized&quot;. Anyway, are there significant obstacles to re-implementation?<p>Someone above mentioned an alternative that uses LoRa. That&#x27;s nice but it sounds like the attraction of Firechat was that it used ordinary phones that everyone already has. LoRa by comparison is special hardware that is already a bit suspicious.<p>If you&#x27;re willing to use special purpose radios and live with low bandwidth text communication, you can do quite a bit better than LoRa, such as with JS8CALL and HF radios. But, a sad &quot;theorem&quot; tells us that any communications medium will be beaten into carrying video....

Would Briar be a good alternative?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;</a><p>edit: How it works: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;how-it-works&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;briarproject.org&#x2F;how-it-works&#x2F;</a>

It is endlessly depressing to me that the &#x27;revolutionary&#x27; tools that so often catch on aren&#x27;t free and open source.

To be clear, FireChat was a proprietary and closed source app which went away for reasons that only the people controlling it truly understand. That immediately suggests to me more of a &quot;the money ran out&quot; situation vs the more salacious &quot;the CIA had a word&quot; style implication at the end of the parent.

Huh, I&#x27;ve had the mesh network concept rolling around in the back of my head for years specifically due to FireChat. I had no idea it was gone - guess I took it for granted.<p>Wonder if anybody&#x27;s got more info on what happened?

Meshtastic is alive <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meshtastic.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meshtastic.org&#x2F;</a>

Tangential story time!<p>Several years ago (circa 2015) I was asked to build an app like FireChat by just the _oddest_ couple of guys I&#x27;ve ever met. They wanted an app where you could connect to other folks just by being near them. I never could get them to agree on what exactly the app was supposed to be beyond that.<p>The first gentleman was a VP-type for a large company. He insisted that the app (nicknamed &quot;Pals&quot; at the time) was for people with similar interests to find each other and connect based on just being near the same place at the same time.<p>The second partner was a well-known lawyer in my city. When I mentioned their app sounds like a dating app, this guy says to the first man, &quot;SEE! It&#x27;s a dating app.&quot; And then he proceeds to tell me (in graphic detail) his proposed strategy to build a dating app that would tell you where the other person is when you go to meet them in person. He essentially wanted to be able to spy on them to see if the person matched their online description or not before committing to the date.<p>I thought the idea, while clever, was also super creepy but offered to build it for them. I thought if they pivoted to something like large-scale live events they might have something. Imagine going to a sporting event and having a group chat with everyone else at the stadium. Great way to make new friends&#x2F;contacts to hang out with later.<p>They hired a marketing firm to build it instead, and last I heard they had given up on the idea. I guess the only good that really came out of it was that I had a lawyer to call when I had to go to traffic court a few years later. Turns out he was actually pretty good at his job.

FireChat was never going to be resilient enough because it was installed on Apple and Google controlled devices.<p>This kind of system needs a dedicated or at least &#x27;open&#x27; device with adequate hardware to support wireless mesh networks.<p>I would love to see something like this, because we (even, or rather, especially; Western countries) currently have no decentralized fallback for emergency communication. If the electric grid and cellphone network go... most people don&#x27;t even have AM radios at this point.

I applied to open garden many years ago, solved their coding challenges but after back and forth it didn&#x27;t go anywhere.<p>It seem Stas has since then started clostra.com The fireside chat messenger just rebranded. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;download" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;download</a>.<p>I love a good conspiracy but shows little evidence.

It&#x27;s gone because it was barely usable.

FireChat is gone because apparently it wasn&#x27;t open source, otherwise it would still be here

It didn&#x27;t quite disappear. AFAICT, the core team is working on NewNode now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;firechat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newnode.com&#x2F;firechat</a><p>The text mentions an anodyne &quot;for business reasons&quot;, so that should leave the door wide open for any conspiracy theories ;)

The article mentions Singaporeans, so I was very curious to find out how they were involved. But the word (erroneously?) links to the Hong Kong protests movement.

This sounds like a scam. The was something similar a few years ago in Germany, a messenger advertised to criminals. Turned out to be a trap.

I&#x27;m surprised that no one mentioned quaul – <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qaul.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qaul.net&#x2F;</a><p>It seems very nice.

Very suspicious ending, which calls into question the real origin story.

someone&#x2F;some team can easily recreate this app.

&gt; <i>FireChat is gone because FireChat was a threat to the systems it circumvented.</i><p>This seems needlessly conspiratorial. Apps and companies disappear all the time and it&#x27;s usually for boring reasons.

If you really want a chat tool to start a revolution, meet in person with people you trust and don&#x27;t bring any electronic devices with you. And only talk to people who you really trust. Forget phones.