Universal Chat Application, Beeper, Will Be Available To Everyone (For Free) In A Matter Of Weeks.
❤️🔥 Hot Beeper Summer
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.
This post reads like an ad, how is it upvoted so much?
Well known software built using Matrix. A lot of people have been following this project.
Yeah I'm excited about it. Dubious and skeptical, but excited too.
You are asking the right questions, keep digging deeper! Ban all Karma and abolish all mods and admins!
Self-host an instance with no karma and no mods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Afaik, that isn't in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.
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.
It's how you used to buy weed.
Correct: It was the dealers best friend.
I had a pager in highschool. 🧓
It's what those ancient iPads, I think they were called b'oks had right? ;-)
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.
That brought up some memories I had suppressed lol.
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?)
Ok but why is the thumbnail a scene from Midsommar…
Came here to ask this... (Also love that movie tho)
Ok but why is the thumbnail a scene from Midsommar…
Probably because the leading image is taken from Midsommar.
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.
Pidgin. That failed. Then we have matrix. That kinda failed. And now beeper?
I don't know..
Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.
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.
Beeper is Matrix in a trenchcoat, judging by their Github page.
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.
See my reaction above (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/11834/-/comment/90707)
Well... I'm using pidgin right now.
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?
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.
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.
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
Anyone have any thoughts on the privacy and security aspect of this?
Your messages will go through their servers. They claim they don't persist anything but you can't really have any proof of that.
There could even be NSA spyware that they're not aware of in their data centers.
On my end the post had 0 comments lol, but yes I see when I open it in a browser that my app is bugging out
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
And the cost is simply your privacy and security
Apparently it's based on matrix bridges, and you can self-host it if you want. Sounds intriguing imo.
It’s not all bad, you’re right. It’s just that this
To use Beeper, you must give the app permission to send and receive messages through other chat networks using your account credentials. By definition, this may be less secure than using other chat apps alone, especially encrypted chat apps like Signal.
Makes me lose interest. I understand the motivation behind it, yes they encrypt e2e but it’s still sacrificing security (or maybe I should say increasing risk)
Self hosting is a good alternative option!
Honestly this app sounds almost too good to be true, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it anyways just in case.
Been using it for about 2 months, set up was easy I just hate resigning into everything haha. So far it has been exactly what I needed, a place for my android texts, iOS texts, and discord messages in one place.
My one bug I ran into is when sharing something to someone I click their name on the menu that pops up on androids and instead of opening the chat with that person it opens the list of my recent texting partners.
Applicable XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
Beeper is built on top of Matrix, so it's not actually creating a new standard here.
I don't care about beeper one way or another, but that bloody image with the post, it needs to die in a fire.
Been using their bridges for over 2 years, super happy that I no longer need WhatsApp installed on my phone.
If you're like me and live in a country where a shitty chat application is required to be able to function in society, software like this is a breath of fresh air. The bridges are also super stable and incredibly well written.
Note: to be clear, I don't use beeper itself, but use their open source bridges (what beeper is using internally) on my own self hosted Matrix server.
The one thing that sucks about bridging and is never likely to be solved is voice calls through bridges. Theres really no good way to implement it as you would essentially need to have the bridge call you through matrix after you get a WhatsApp call.
Yes, this is very correct.
As a person who's been using said bridges as his primary form of contact for years, it's very difficult to tell people: "Hey, I'm not actually reachable on Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram, please just call me instead".
As a result, I have a backup "net phone" in one of my cupboards with each of those apps installed. If I'm dealing with a particularly stubborn person I have to use it as a fall back.
So, while I love these bridges, your comment is completely valid and anyone thinking of using them should be aware of that.
TLDR, my Matrix chats are filled with:
> Person A (WA): Incoming call
> Me: I don't have whatsapp, needs to be a normal call :(
> Person A (WA): Ok. Calling in five minutes.
I remember trying to setup matrix bridges using these exact repositories a while ago!
So if this company does the dirty job behind like server management and brings it nicely packaged as product, I'm fine with this. I'm tired of having to install more than 2-3 apps (lots of families abroad) just to communicate.
You can use any matrix client with beeper according to their FAQ. It's frustrating that they forked element and kept the source code closed, but it is Apache 2.0, so it's not against the licence terms.
"pebble notification support" then show just the generic default support with no action? (No black dot on the right). I can reply to WhatsApp messages using the pebble but here doesn't look like, seems just basic support handled by the pebble app
Pretty funny too, considering they guy behind Beeper is also the original guy behind Pebble.
Meh, there is always some kind of feature it's missing that I want from the official app or one of it's competitors. I tried it for a while but ultimately went back to my regular apps.
So much for waiting on the wait-list.... But I'm excited!!!!
Been self hosting their iMessage matrix bridge for awhile now and it's great
This scans as VCs trying to enclose the internet. If you wanted a communications protocol standard
ActivityPub is more of a social network protocol rather than a messaging protocol. It assumes most data sent through it will get public by default and has very little encryption set up for it, let along E2EE. Now Matrix is a better use case for an open protocol like that and also offers bridges between other chat networks (I wouldn't be surprised if Beeper has Matrix under the hood).
it is matrix yes! and they’re contributing back to the upstream bridges
from their website:
Remember this XKCD comic? That’s why we built Beeper on the open source chat protocol Matrix. Unlike other chat networks, there is no lock-in. You’re free to use open source Matrix clients to connect to Beeper, or download your data and move to a different Matrix server and continue chatting with your friends on Beeper.
Beeper contributes back to the Matrix community. All of our Matrix bridges are open source on our Github. Don't want to pay for Beeper? Self-host your own instance for free.
There’s no reason any of the fields have to be sent cleartext, except maybe the inreplyto property
This is using matrix. You can even connect to it from any matrix client.
what’s wrong with ActivityPub?
End-to-end encryption is still a work in progress there, but also that's more of a social media protocol than a chat protocol.
tell me how this is better than simply changing all my usernames to "CorsicanGuppy is only on Jabber now, so reach out there" and shutting them all down.
(Actually I liked when pidgin worked, as I could receive on walled platforms and respond on open platforms)
But still, continuing to use closed platforms allows them to perpetuate. Sendmail killed bitnet, and we need to only continue that trend.
Just a shame their android app needs play services for notifications, even though Element upstream does not
These universal chat apps often do not offer all of the features the underlying apps have. Which makes sense but is probably a reason they never get massively adopted.
Everyone uses what'sapp in the UK, and from what I understand, other countries. It's the US that seems to have a weird attachment to iMessage.
The faceblocked and facebanned don't and can't. Open chat matters
Got in yesterday. iMessage is working fine through it. I wonder for how long if this gets traction.
I love beeper - very excited for people to get access to it
Is this something like texts.com?
Why juggle multiple messaging apps when you can have all your conversations in one place? SocialSmartly is the solution you've been waiting for. 😍
Overall it's been pretty good. I mainly needed it to stop the problem of having an Android phone and MacBook, where sometimes texts from iPhone users "slip" to Messenger on my laptop and I don't see them until I'm at my computer. I cant get it to take over my native Android messages, and it glitches when I get a call on WhatsApp where I have to open WhatsApp manually to answer, but still worth it.
There was a bit in the Office about this... 🐶
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 was about to say, I do this already with Matrix.
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?
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.
Element seems like a perfectly good client to me.
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