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.
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
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!
Yeah, I should have clarified that. Hopefully the EU regulation regarding messaging interoperability removes this (currently unavoidable) flaw.
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.
A bit off topic, but is this dev unironically using thin, light gray text on a white background?
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.
My worry would be who is funding it and how they plan to keep operating. Venture Capital startups will always betray their users.
their clients are proprietary but it’s built on matrix (federated chat kinda like xmpp) and their bridges (things that connect matrix to other protocols) are open source
they say you can use any matrix client, and that you can host your own home server with their bridges
I have my own matrix server that I primarily use like beeper and bridge all my chats together. Even using some of their bridges, it’s been pretty reliable for years.
I know that a few people are hating on the closed source client, but that feels unfair to me. They provide lots of open code in the form of bridges which is really the meat of the offering. Their client just makes using the bridges easier for the lay person. The bridges are super easy to use without it, invite the bridge bot to a chat room, type login and do what it says, then type login-matrix and your pretty much done.
The I suspect that the same people who are displeased about the closed client also like using tailscale which is generally pretty popular but has closed source clients on Windows and Mac as well as the server (though all support the open source headscale server)
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.
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.
You are asking the right questions, keep digging deeper! Ban all Karma and abolish all mods and admins!
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is really region dependent. In Europe (or at least the Netherlands) almost everybody with a smartphone uses Whatsapp
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.
