I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.

The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.

  • Matricaria@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I tried Beeper two weeks ago.

    Performance was not great and I didn’t like the apps design that much but most importantly: this is not what I want. I want chat apps to be interoperable. I don’t want to be on WhatsApp and Signal and Matrix and yadayadayada. I want to be only on Matrix in the future. I hope the EUs DMA makes that happen.

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    This looks like a promising application; and as long as the business models stay sustainable and the company remains ethical; it should be a good place.

    I’ll bite and queue up.

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    think I’m gonna give this a try but the style of writing in the blog post isn’t making this easy

    👩‍🚀 Spacebar

    Not the one on your keyboard, silly 😜

    shudders

    • Sordid@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m skeptical. Trillian still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. It can’t connect to a bunch of services because their operators decided to disable third-party access, and I remember that even back in the day it was constantly playing catch-up with network updates that broke compatibility. “One chat app to rule them all” is a neat idea, but I don’t see it working in practice.

      • Seathru@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, it’s been so long now I don’t remember why I stopped using Trillian (and Pidgin). But when it worked, it was so much nicer just to have one program running vs 5.

        • Sordid@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don’t even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.

          • Seathru@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.

            Same here. And I can’t put my finger on it. I always dismissed it as coming of age and lifestyle changes.

      • zhunk@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I used to use Disa, I think until the FB messenger connection broke? I hate that I have 6 apps in my IMs folder.

    • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Yep, immediately closed the page when I saw that in the sign up.

      Zero reason they need my phone number, fuck off

  • SFaulken@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I don’t care about beeper one way or another, but that bloody image with the post, it needs to die in a fire.

  • GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Well universal chat (like universal e-mail) is either going to be a common open protocol (does not seem very likely given Apple and all the other players) or is going to be something like this on the client side. Although its a lot of work, it does seem more possible. The only pity is it can’t solve connecting to services that I don’t use like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp.

  • Rbon@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    While I agree that it would be nice to only have one app installed in order to chat with everyone, the fact that it’s not open source makes me question the privacy involved. I’ve already sold my soul to these individual chat apps. I’d rather not compound that problem.

    • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
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      1 year ago

      The bridges are all open source, and they use matrix synapse as their server installation - though their client is a closed source fork of element with changes. You can use any matrix client to connect to it, and they say it’s a standard synapse setup.

      If privacy is a concern, bringing your own client should remove that concern as the rest is open source. It’s also e2e encrypted, as any matrix server is.

      I self host my own matrix homeserver with bridges set up using their code. The only bit of their stack I can’t use is the client. I don’t like that that’s closed source, that’s frustrating.

      Edit: while writing this two more people made the same comment. Sorry!

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        closed source fork of element with changes

        🚩🚩🚩

        e2e encrypted

        More like “e2mitm2e” encrypted, with the mitm being the bridges.

        If the target network doesn’t support encryption, that’s “e2mitm2null”… does it at least alert you in that case?

        • krolden@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Then run your own matrix instance with these bridges that they maintain for the community.

          • jarfil@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            That still doesn’t fix the e2e problem. Just because only me, and let’s hope not too many others who manage to break into the instance, can mitm everything, doesn’t make the mitm go away.

            There really should be a standard, or at least a set of standards, on how to do e2e, so the bridges would only need to route the messages.

      • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninja
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        1 year ago

        Beeper’s server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can “self host Beeper” that’s really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here’s a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.

        • Geronimo Wenja@agora.nop.chat
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          1 year ago

          Most of that extra stuff is there to handle user contact privacy and security with the bridges, which is fair. I don’t have any interest in self hosting beepers full setup, I want to get the functionality of multiple messaging services in one client - which I have, with my self-hosted matrix instance and the bridges they help develop and maintain.

          I wish all of it was open source, but I did feel it necessary to head off comments that imply that the entire thing is closed source. Their implementation around dynamic servers and isolated containers spinning up isn’t really the bit that seems relevant regarding user privacy with regards to data scraping or anything. There are a lot of comments in here implying it’s fully proprietary, but there’s a lot more nuance to it than that, as you point out.

          Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

          • pitninja@lemmy.pit.ninja
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            1 year ago

            Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

            I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.