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.

  • Rbon
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    1481 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.

        • @upstream@beehaw.org
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          11 year ago

          But how do you know that the frontend is trustworthy? People assume that frontends only talk to one backend.

          Web should have thought people otherwise, but for most people it’s pretty indistinguishable from magic.

      • fmstrat
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        21 year ago

        I was about to say, I do this already with Matrix.

    • Geronimo Wenja
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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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        51 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
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          11 year ago

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

          • @jarfil@beehaw.org
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            21 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
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        41 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
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          31 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
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            31 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.

          • @chipt4@beehaw.org
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            11 year ago

            It looks like they’re slides from a powerpoint style presentation… in the following frames, the light grey text is legible. Still, not a good way to present that data, heh. Stuff like that irks me so bad

          • pitninja
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            11 year ago

            I’m not sure where this text is that you’re referring to.

      • fmstrat
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        11 year ago

        Element seems like a perfectly good client to me.

    • Chloyster [she/her]
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      121 year ago

      The connections to the apps are all open source, as the other user said. And you can self host it too if you want to go that route

  • Irina
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    771 year ago

    My worry would be who is funding it and how they plan to keep operating. Venture Capital startups will always betray their users.

    • Chris RemingtonOP
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      121 year ago

      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.

          • @Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            331 year ago

            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.

            • cerothem
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              71 year ago

              To be fair, the client they provide to make bridging more accessible is proprietary, however you can fire up a fresh copy of element and connect it if you want and just use the text interface.

              The clients are closed so that they have something to sell and profit. Not everyone can afford to give their time away for free.

            • Chris RemingtonOP
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              41 year ago

              I’ll take the risk knowing what I know about the Beeper people that I’ve been working with for over two years.

              • Irina
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                101 year ago

                If you know the team, then that’s a pretty good reason to trust them. Only works if you know the team, though.

              • @jarfil@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                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.

    • Sam
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      501 year ago

      Well known software built using Matrix. A lot of people have been following this project.

    • @ELI70@lemmy.run
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      51 year ago

      You are asking the right questions, keep digging deeper! Ban all Karma and abolish all mods and admins!

      • Sam
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        111 year ago

        Self-host an instance with no karma and no mods.

  • Matricaria
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    451 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.

    • @lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de
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      121 year ago

      I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

      • Matricaria
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        91 year ago

        I don’t think it does. You can’t delete any of the other apps and no one actually uses Matrix after all.

        It might even do the opposite, where apps like WhatsApp can argue that they are now interoperable so they don’t have to change anything.

        • Geronimo Wenja
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          51 year ago

          Luckily, the DMA has a heap of requirements around what their messaging interoperability will have do. For one thing, it will enforce the providers to not downgrade any encryption along the way, so FB etc will have to handle messages without them being decrypted first. There are some great videos that the matrix foundation put on their YouTube channel of talks that go over much of this.

  • @dan@upvote.au
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    311 year ago

    There’s reasons people moved away from multi-network apps like Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin… They were always playing catch-up with the official clients, and frequently broke when there were server-side changes. Protocols for proprietary messaging apps were (and still are) undocumented. I’m not convinced they’ve actually solved any of these issues.

    • @lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de
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      291 year ago

      I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

      If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

      They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

      • @dan@upvote.au
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        191 year ago

        I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

        Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.

        I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

        Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I’m not sure what’d they’d be doing differently to what Trillian did.

        • @shrugal@lemm.ee
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          101 year ago

          I think one difference is that the rate of change in chat apps has slowed down dramatically. When was the last time one of the major apps added a new feature you can’t live without anymore? So it might be easier now to keep up.

    • @aksdb@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Huh, in my opinion people simply moved away, because the underlying messenger were used less and less. Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.

      • GadgeteerZA
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        91 year ago

        Not “everyone” uses Whatsapp though - I deleted mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I know of a few others who also did so. As far as I know Whatsapp has still never changed their T&C to pass metadata upstream to Facebook.

        • @thesylveranti@feddit.nl
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          131 year ago

          This is really region dependent. In Europe (or at least the Netherlands) almost everybody with a smartphone uses Whatsapp

          • @neutron@thelemmy.club
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            111 year ago

            Talk to anyone in latin america, you must use whatsapp. There’s no avoiding it. Some have tried Telegram a while ago, but most have reverted back to their usual whatsapp or facebook messenger. It’s crazy.

            • @NekoRiv@lemmynsfw.com
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              31 year ago

              I can vouch for this in a small town of like 5k people in zacatecas, Mexico. Everyone including government and businesses uses WhatsApp. You see the logo with phone numbers all over the place.

          • GadgeteerZA
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            31 year ago

            No, not regionally, as Whatsapp is probably used most. It is more individuals who decided not to use Facebook related products. Luckily, about 90% of my contacts are on Telegram. It’s a bit sad that a proprietary product that leaks metadata could be so widely used. If there was going to be a single “one product” I’d rather prefer that to be an open standard protocol. Those protocols exist, but are not in broad use. But the W3C standard for social networking, really needs to also cover chat messengers.

        • @aksdb@feddit.de
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          41 year ago

          Now? Sure. Back then WhatsApp (before it was bought by Facebook) was replacing SMS nearly everywhere.

      • @dan@upvote.au
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        31 year ago

        Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.

        People moved around, but often still use several apps even today. You might have a “main” app you use with friends (this used to be MSN Messenger for me back in the day; now it’s Facebook Messenger), but there may be other people you chat to that use other apps. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, Viber, Signal, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Skype, Kik… I feel like there’s actually more major apps today than there used to be.

    • antonamo
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      41 year ago

      On the behalf of your mentioned problem. I don’t know if it still holds as the eu’s digital market act now forces “gatekeeper” messaging apps to open their api.

      • pitninja
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        21 year ago

        Afaik, that isn’t in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.

  • guyrocket
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    251 year ago

    The last time I heard the word beeper it referred to a pager. You kids know what a pager was?

  • 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

  • YⓄ乙
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    211 year ago

    The biggest question of all,- Is it Open source ?

    My phone will only installs opensource apps.

        • @imsodin@infosec.pub
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          31 year ago

          Looks like the client isn’t, but they do offer a simple-way to self-host the backend (looks like it’s “just” a matrix server and a bunch of bridges) and then you can use any open-source matrix client to connect to that. Seems like a pretty good balance of a way to make money and the guts being open enough that one could move if the client/company goes side-ways, while contributing a lot to the open-source community.

  • Melody Fwygon
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    181 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.

  • melroy
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    161 year ago

    Pidgin. That failed. Then we have matrix. That kinda failed. And now beeper?

    I don’t know…

    • fearout
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      Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.

      • melroy
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        11 year ago

        Well… I said ‘kinda failed’. Synapse is still way too slow. And the new dendrite server is still not up to spec. Joining large rooms is still gives me a headache. I can’t easily protect DDoS or spam accounts. I was forced to basically close registrations my Matrix server. And Dendrite is not yet production ready which is a shame… Don’t get me wrong, I do like Matrix in general. I just hope my previous remarks are taken seriously by their devs.

        • fearout
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          11 year ago

          Idk, that’s more of a “not yet finished” thing rather than “failed” imo

          • melroy
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            11 year ago

            yea… you are right. It “sort of failed” at some point, because I’m waiting for Matrix to solve these issues for more then 6 years now… basically since the start…

    • Irina
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      311 year ago

      Beeper is Matrix in a trenchcoat, judging by their Github page.

    • @philpo@feddit.de
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      171 year ago

      How did Matrix fail?

      It’s the base for numerous messengers used by governments around the world, it has a userbase of more than 70 million core users (not counting the various closed messengers). Various competitors (e.g. Rocket Chat) have changed their base to Matrix.

      And Beeper is Matrix with Bridges (which you absolutely could deploy yourself). In theory anyone could recreate the Beeper functionality with existing other apps/bridges AND be able to communicate with Beeper on their native standard - Matrix.

      • melroy
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        21 year ago

        Great! Good to hear you use Pidgin! I love using it in the past as well… I now use Matrix mainly. Should I go back to Pidgin?

    • @jarfil@beehaw.org
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      21 year ago

      Pidgin didn’t use bridges, it tried to be “all the possible clients in one”… with closed source protocols… which went south, fast. It still works for some, though.

      Matrix is running just fine, it doesn’t have the infinite flexibility of XMPP which made XMPP clients incompatible with each other, so as long as it doesn’t jump the shark, it’s just a matter of time to drive adoption.

    • @Sordid@beehaw.org
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      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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        71 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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          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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            31 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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        21 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.

  • calm.like.a.bomb
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    Sorry, I’ll never use a service asking me upfront my phone number “for security purposes.” Fuck off beeper!

    • @Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      31 year ago

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

      Zero reason they need my phone number, fuck off