Walked around Fusion Festival with Bitchat running. Saw about 20 other devices and a few messages. Nobody replied to my messages. So usage isn't zero, but 20 devices out of 80000 people isn't a lot. Most hops I saw was 2, meaning there wasn't enough density to make it any meaningful distance across the festival grounds.
As far as I'm concerned, it was used at several protest and is currently in use in Indian CJP protests. Also Indian government made a request to take down it's repo on GitHub
They have at least added mesh wifi, but yes, the adoption pick up has been fairly slow except in do or die protest scenarios.
It is handy if you're on a plane with someone but your seats are separated because you didn't want to pay an extra $50 to sit next to each other though.
They should add long range WiFi. For example the Espressif long range WiFi protocol (esp-now lr) should get around 2km of range.
With effort, various exploitable WiFi chipsets could probably have support added too. 2km of range makes mesh networking possible even with very low user densities, especially if combined with store-and-forward.
And then there is always the possibility of a hardware dongle with LoRA with 10km range.
but it works?? thats actually kinda neat? i tried bringing airtags to a festival with 30k people so our group could find each other and they just shit the bed and didnt work
