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
oh sweet. I care far more about the backend than frontend
I see what you did there!
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
