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.
My worry would be who is funding it and how they plan to keep operating. Venture Capital startups will always betray their users.
deleted by creator
They will be offering a premium subscription offer for more bells and whistles other than the free option…I don’t know anything about user betrayals conducted by Beeper.
Proprietary clients.
I don’t understand the concern here.
You have no way of verifying that the client is only doing what it claims. The Open Source community is highly suspicious of proprietary software, doubly so when it’s based off of Open Source code.
If youre okay with that then no worries, but ofr myself and many others it’s an absolute deal breaker.
I’ll take the risk knowing what I know about the Beeper people that I’ve been working with for over two years.
“I know these guys, trust me” is not a valid security assessment.
If you know the team, then that’s a pretty good reason to trust them. Only works if you know the team, though.
Sounds reasonable to me
That’s fine… for you, right now.
But I (and probably most users) don’t know them, over time people come and go, some even change who they are, businesses get sold. Only open source persists.
Thankfully all of the Matrix bridges they created for Beeper are open source.
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.
The last time I heard the word beeper it referred to a pager. You kids know what a pager was?
You kids know what a pager was?
Yes.
Lol.
I owned one for a while.
I had a pager in highschool. 🧓
Some time ago I found my old CocaCola Beeper. That time might’ve been 10+ years ago…
Lol.
Kinda funny how quickly those disappeared when cell phones came along.
For… free… seems like people make a very strong effort to not learn a shit from experiences
Right this sounds like giving all of my personal messages to one more entity.
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.
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
I guess the target demographic is tweens?
tweens
Now called 𝕏ns… (too soon?)
And the cost is simply your privacy and security
This looks like a modern Trillian. It’s about time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to use Disa, I think until the FB messenger connection broke? I hate that I have 6 apps in my IMs folder.
I was a Trillian beta tester as well.
Thank you for your service. Those really were the days.
Edit: not dismissing your current work. This place is pretty nice too :)
Welcome :)
Sorry, I’ll never use a service asking me upfront my phone number “for security purposes.” Fuck off beeper!
Yep, immediately closed the page when I saw that in the sign up.
Zero reason they need my phone number, fuck off
Applicable XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
I don’t care about beeper one way or another, but that bloody image with the post, it needs to die in a fire.
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.
The EU is forcing the big chat companies to open their gates. They have until April of next year to comply, so we might see a common protocol for chat pretty soon
This one I hadn’t heard about until now, do you have a link to some more information?
Digital market act https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
Chat apps are only part of it. It will force iOS and android to offer competing app market too.
Oh, I hadn’t realized chat apps were covered by it, but that sounds promising! Thanks for the link 🙂
That is really going to be interesting, yes! It is seriously needed despite what Apple will say. And if implemented correctly it can still be E2EE but with our own client apps.
Would beeper give me access to iMessage without having an iDevice?
Yes
Sorry for the follow up question but is it text only or is it a workaround for the video compression as well?
Thanks for sharing, regardless it’s promising!
Text, images, videos…I believe there is, or will be soon, video conferencing.
My parents are going to be getting a lot more dog videos soon!
So much for waiting on the wait-list… But I’m excited!!!
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.
In the back of it, it seems to be a series of Matrix bridges https://github.com/beeper
oh sweet. I care far more about the backend than frontend
I see what you did there!
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!
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?
Then run your own matrix instance with these bridges that they maintain for the community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
