Comment on Beeper is now available, no waitlist!
derin@lemmy.beru.co 8 months agoNot closed source. It’s just a Matrix server instance running their own bridges. All the backend stuff is open source, the only closed source part is their client.
The client is specific to their site and unnecessary: just deploy Synapse, then pick and deploy the bridges of their suite you want to your server. You can then pick and use any of the available Matrix clients to get the same exact features. You can even sponsor them on Github, as I’ve been doing for months.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 8 months ago
Which is exactly what I’m referring to. Plus, they can say they run a matrix server, but if your frontend is closed source, there’s no way I trust that they actually do run a fully opensource backend. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit to hear/read that they have closed source components in the backend too. Big nope from me.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
derin@lemmy.beru.co 8 months ago
You can use any Matrix client with Beeper, you don’t have to use theirs.
Regardless, there’s nothing stopping you from recreating the same stack using the available tools.
What makes their service unique are the bridges. Download their sources, compile them, and then pair them with any server client combo you want.
If you insist on using their stack, you can still use an OSS client. They chose not to make their client open source as it is, by design, for their service only.
It absolutely isn’t “Anti Commercial Ai thingy”.
shrugal@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What is this “closed source experience” you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, when their stated goals is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!
Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don’t really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I’m actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.
jarfil@beehaw.org 8 months ago
I can answer that: it’s the “I don’t care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people” experience.
From the looks of it, it’s as secure as having WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/ProtonMail doing “E2EE” through each app’s servers, and never knowing whether the client did the encryption right, or if it sent the keys to the server for messages to get intercepted… well, except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway.
derin@lemmy.beru.co 8 months ago
Just use any open source client. You can literally do that.
And if you don’t trust the company - for any reason - use their code to deploy your own backend.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Given it’s all entirely self host able if you use a different client I’m not sure how they could be
Unless there’s some binary blobs hidden in the repo but you’d think someone would have pointed that out by now