Knit – Messaging Without the Network

I love the idea behind this app, but I fail to see how it could ever get enough adoption to be useful.

For a regular messaging application, you only need (some of) your contacts to have it installed for it to be useful. Here, you need enough people that happen to be physically nearby to have it installed to build a useful relay mesh. That sounds like an insane minimum level of adoption.

Also, it's a chicken and egg problem: The app needs to be installed on lots of devices to be useful. But the app needs to be useful for people to install it.

But I'd love to be wrong about this. I'd love to see a concrete plan on how to get this to lots of users.