The offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns

Ever since listening to the first episode of Revolution Social with rabble and Jack Dorsey, my opinions on Dorsey have slightly changed. I didn't understand - not fully - why he allowed the sale of Twitter to Elon, but that episode talks more about it (tl;dr: capitalism wins over logic every time). That capital has been one he's been sitting on but as of late, he's been funding a lot of projects that are anti-cenorship, something I'm adamant about, which is different from moderation, something Dorsey inherently disagrees with as a concept (to my understanding, at least global moderation; selectively imposable moderation like ATProto is more of his speed, though he had angsts with it being built in).

Across the globe, state-enforced internet blackouts have become a primary weapon against protests and independent journalism during political crises. Beyond silencing dissent, these measures serve to block real-time documentation and evade international scrutiny of official misconduct.

The next time someone tells you that the Internet isn't real life; point them to this article. If they're still apathetic, they don't need their opinions to be taken that seriously.

This report is compelling. The now-fascist Indian state has been attempting to silence protestors for some time now. I've only learned of the state of India by way of the amazing work of Arundhati Roy. But having a government attempt to block access to code that is legally free has a bad way of precedents — imagine if the United States' president passed an executive order blocking any code that helps promotes critical race theory?! Wikipedia, Google, the whole Internet would be out!

Bitchat reached an all-time high of 430,000 daily active users in India on July 26, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Between July 20 and July 26, India accounted for 74% of the app’s global downloads.

If this is not a market signal that the app is ripe for revolutionary (if not counter-state insurgency) action, then I don't know what is. Those paying attention will most definitely be looking to see how they can expand this with things like mesh networking or WiFi repeaters to boost up what's available over Bluetooth. Dorsey going as far as posting the government order on his old platform (ironically, I don't think he did it on Primal, the Nostr equivalent of Twitter/X) took me out.

As someone building a social network for readers, especially those who want to read radically, I can only imagine that it's a matter of time before this reaches other places and becomes a new battlefield of sorts.