Universal Chat Application, Beeper, Will Be Available To Everyone (For Free) In A Matter Of Weeks.

In the back of it, it seems to be a series of Matrix bridges https://github.com/beeper

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You kids know what a pager was?

Yes.

It's how you used to buy weed.

I had a pager in highschool. 🧓

That brought up some memories I had suppressed lol.

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...

All of the Matrix bridges, written for use with Beeper, are open source.

I guess the target demographic is tweens?

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.

Right this sounds like giving all of my personal messages to one more entity.

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

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.

Well... I'm using pidgin right now.

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.

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.

I was a Trillian beta tester as well.

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.

Apparently it's based on matrix bridges, and you can self-host it if you want. Sounds intriguing imo.

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

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

Zero reason they need my phone number, fuck off

Yes

Yes! One of the main reasons lots of people use Beeper

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.

Beeper is built on top of Matrix, so it's not actually creating a new standard here.

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.

Pretty funny too, considering they guy behind Beeper is also the original guy behind Pebble.

Not in my case. I don't care about the bells and whistles that messenging apps keep adding, I just want to send and receive messages.

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).

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.

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.

WUPHF!