80,000 phones, one mesh
We took Nobars to a three-day festival where the towers gave up by noon. Here's what happened to the messages.
Mara Ellison2 min read
News
Dispatches from the edge of the network
Releases, field notes from places with no signal, and the engineering behind the mesh.
How a message hops
A message with no tower to call has to be passed by hand. This is the path it takes, one radio at a time.
Devin Park2 min read
Six models that never phone home
Offline AI shipped this spring. Here's how we picked the models, and what it means to run them on a phone with no signal.
Priya Raghunathan1 min read
We forked bitchat. Here's what we changed
Same protocol, same mesh, a different product around it. An honest account of what we kept, what we rebuilt, and what we owe upstream.
Devin Park1 min read
1.2: rooms, voice notes, and a battery win
Neighbourhood rooms, short voice notes over the mesh, and idle battery use down by a third.
Priya Raghunathan1 min read
What a blackout taught us about queues
Twelve hours with no power and no towers in Valencia. The messages that mattered were the ones nobody was awake to receive.
Mara Ellison1 min read
