[deleted]
Beeper is now available, no waitlist!
Submitted 11 months ago by remington@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/
Comments
Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org 11 months ago
TheFrirish@jlai.lu 11 months ago
Honestly I understand where you’re coming from but I’m going to be a bit pragmatic, it’s free, it centralizes all my shit chat apps into one “shit app” (the app is excellent so far) I won’t bridge it to signal because that would be my safe app but for insta, messenger, Discord, telegram and even SMS/RCS I have no issues
toiletobserver@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Reil@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Love the CEO sketches! And they’re not even in the top five things Brennan has done, probably!
tesseract@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Wow! That’s one annoying video!
jherazob@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Bought by Automattic? After they non-consensually took all of Tumblr and hosted Wordpress to train AI? And after their big boss revealed his transphobia? I guess i’ll skip this one
Kissaki@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Gravatar was a great, minimal, independent service. U until they acquired it and integrated it into their WordPress platform and onboarding (trying to get you to become a customer).
jherazob@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Dammit yes! Mandatory shot out to David Revoy and his replacements of it (and the blog post where he mentions how he divested himself of CDNs).
miss_brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Be so nice to notify your contacts about breaking e2ee then, will ya
Vodulas@beehaw.org 11 months ago
The Android version has a local bridge that does not break ee2e for Signal. It is an experimental option, but it was easy to turn on and use
miss_brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
It’s nice that the option exists, I didn’t know that. But I have to say, I’m still not a fan of the overall concept of bridges
koncertejo@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
That seems really exciting! But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.
remington@beehaw.org 11 months ago
I’ve been using Beeper with a Discord bridge for three years now. No problems.
BreakDecks@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Beeper isn’t a Discord client.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Kind of is though, if it quacks like a duck
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Alright, I got to ask. Having one app for all these services sounds great. I remember some drama around it though, don’t recall the details. So what am I missing, is this actually good news?
Its not open source but neither are most of the apps it connects to.
remington@beehaw.org 11 months ago
drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
How is beeper reading my Discord DMs without breaching Discord TOS?
Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org 11 months ago
[deleted]drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
I’ve already Discord had accounts snupped out from under me not giving them my phone number, I don’t wanna give them a real reason to ban me 😅
flashgnash@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Discord’s own Linux client is kinda ass and keeps breaking my build using old insecure electron versions/forcing you to update before you can use the app while not being up to date in my package manager
Gotta use a custom client anyway to keep my sanity intact
remington@beehaw.org 11 months ago
I’ve been using a Discord bridge with Beeper for three years with no problems.
drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
That’s not what I asked
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
That’s the source code for the Discord bridge, I’m talking about Beeper
chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
thanks but I don’t need this proprietary shit
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
It’s not proprietary, lol. You can download and deploy each of their bridges yourself to your own servers.
Source: been using their WhatsApp, Discord, and Signal bridges for over a year. I use Github sponsors to pay for development, as I appreciate how great they are.
The only closed source part of their stack is their client, which you don’t have to use.
Also, they’re some of the most prolific contributors to Matrix outside of Element. The emoji picker in Element was literally PR’ed by Tulir.
Love it when folk see people trying to make money off OSS and immediately resort to hysterics. It really makes closed source development look appealing if you’re going to be damned by idealogues regardless of whether you release the source or not.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Another closed source chat app? Yeah, no thanks.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
Not 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 11 months ago
the only closed source part is their client.
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
starman@programming.dev 11 months ago
Tried to log-in into Discord -> not working (probably because of TOTP)
Tried to log-in into Facebook Messenger -> not working (probably because I use it without Facebook account)
Seems like it’s not ready yet
mlsw@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
I guess I can finally use proper WhatsApp web on iPad 😂
pacoboyd@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Sadly doesn’t appear to be usable for SMS by Google Fi users who have web sync enabled. Guess I’ll be holding off.
iAmTheTot@kbin.social 11 months ago
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/
shrugal@lemm.ee 11 months ago
This is not applicable here, since Beeper is “just” Matrix + Bridges + Simplified UX!
realitista@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Add iMessage and Viber and I’m in.
Templa@beehaw.org 11 months ago
I wish there was an web app.
samc@feddit.uk 11 months ago
There is, they just don’t publicise it. Actually one of my favourite features of the service tbf. Just load up a web page and all my messages are there, regardless of where they came from.
toothpicks@beehaw.org 11 months ago
What is it lol
_edge@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Without iMessage, right?
remington@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Some self-hosters have been able to get iMessage working.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Unless I am missing something, it did not send Signal messages to Android Auto, and that is kind of a deal breaker for me.
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
There’s a lot of FUD in this comments section, so I’d like to clear the air. I’m pretty big on OSS myself, so it pains me to see a company doing all the right things get lambasted like this.
Beeper is just a Matrix server running in tandem with a series of custom, open source bridges written by Beeper. The value proposition is not having to deploy a Matrix server yourself, and not having to deploy each bridge yourself.
However, if you want to do that you absolutely can. I’ve been running Synapse + a subset of their bridges for a couple years now (the WhatsApp one being the oldest), and they are fantastic.
The devs contribute back to Matrix all the time and are great about supporting the spec as a responsible third party.
Their only closed source software is their client, which is - by definition - only written to work with their servers and not generic Matrix servers (e.g. It’s just a preconfigured matrix client which expects each bridge to be deployed, and doesn’t ask you for things like what server you want). As a result, you wouldn’t want to use it with your own stack; you can just pick one of the myriad OSS clients available for Matrix and go with that. I use SchildiChat, for example.
I don’t understand why, after doing all this work and publishing the source online for free (free as in freedom), they aren’t allowed to offer a preconfigured service to non tech savvy folk?
Honest question: Shouldn’t they be paid for their work?
jarfil@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Not sure there is much FUD, let me see if I can sum up the points:
TL;DR: Sounds like a reasonable way to move unencrypted messages around… but falls short of fixing the problem of having secure interoperable E2EE.
Should they get paid for it? Probably, if you find that useful.
(¹: if there is any bridge capable of forwarding encrypted messages without decrypting, please correct me)
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
The not cool parts just relate to any sort of hosted bridge. If you don’t trust them with decrypting messages on their end, then don’t give them your data - there are no bridges capable of doing that, anywhere.
So it really comes down to “trust someone else with your data, or host it yourself”; and if you’re - understandably - frustrated with those options blame companies like WhatsApp or Discord that make it nigh impossible to integrate their services with outside networks.
Functionally, these bridges just forward your content to a library acting like a headless client - there’s no way to encrypt that as the reverse engineered clients are not libraries and need to take raw input. You can’t end to end encrypt it as the client is one of the “ends”.
As an example, the WhatsApp bridge uses WhatsApp web as a backend, and has all the limitations of WA web.
As a result, I find the expectations to be a bit unrealistic.
flashgnash@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Does the whole encryption/decryption thing still bother you if you self host?
I tried out the app, the value there is that it’s ready to go straight away, though I took it all down again because my messages being unencrypted on someone else’s server makes me uneasy. May end up self hosting it for that reason and not using anything closed source
remington@beehaw.org 11 months ago
All of that needed to be said. Thank you.
Kissaki@beehaw.org 11 months ago
Seems like they did good until now. I’m not confident, even skeptical, that will keep going after the acquisition though.
Gravatar was a great, independent, minimal service. Now it’s a horrendous, bloated service.
derin@lemmy.beru.co 11 months ago
I hope they continue to do good, but am also skeptical.
And, man, I miss the old Gravatar.