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.

    • Chris Remington@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 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.

  • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zone
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    1 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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          1 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.

  • 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.

    • jarfil@beehaw.org
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      1 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.

    • fearout@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

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

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
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        1 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.

  • dan@upvote.au
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    1 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.

    • 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@beehaw.org
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        1 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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          1 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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            1 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.

            • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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              1 year ago

              I am in a different part of the world, and what you are saying is also true here for the older generation, while the younger one has no escape from Telegram.

    • lotanis@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 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.