https://blog.beeper.com/p/hot-beeper-summer
Our quest to make Beeper the best chat app on Earth continues. Recap the progress we’ve made, ICYMI.
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.
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!
It's also e2e encrypted
well, in Beeper's case one of the ends is their server. your message gets encrypted when you send it, decrypted on Beeper's server, and then forwarded to the service you're bridging with.
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?
That still doesn't fix the e2e problem. Just because only me, and let's hope not too many others who manage to break into the instance, can mitm everything, doesn't make the mitm go away.
There really should be a standard, or at least a set of standards, on how to do e2e, so the bridges would only need to route the messages.
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.
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.
I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That's what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it's just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn't say "self host Beeper" on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they're showing you how to set up with Matrix.
A bit off topic, but is this dev unironically using thin, light gray text on a white background?
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
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)
yeah... pragmatism beats purity every time: they're doing some great work, but to do that great work they have to fund it somehow... i think that open sourcing all of the functional components (the bridges) and keeping the shiny UI closed is a pretty good way of doing that!
i guess i get not wanting to used closed source clients too, but it's shades of grey: people shouldn't hate on them for keeping 1 part closed source!
Only problem is, the average user gets hooked to the shiny UI, not to the invisible backend.
When Microsoft bought Skype, they switched from a secure P2P network to a server-centered network easy to mitm... and the majority of users said nothing. Later on, they switched a few UI elements, and suddenly there was a user uproar.
If Beeper gains any traction, a shiny privative UI is their out to monetize/enshittify the service.
sure, but an open source UI isn’t going to change that… they’d just close the source!
sure you can fork it, but you can also just copy the UI to an open source clone
imagine if twitter were activitypub: kinda like having an OSS backend with a proprietary front end… i’d bet the move to mastodon would be far quicker… network effects keep people on twitter… same here with OSS backend: we can reimplement the UI and people will have the same experience
Based on the history of how Google Chat used XMPP to federate and basically siphon users into its closed UI, then defederate... I no longer trust anyone with a closed UI that's planning to offer "extra value" to its users.
If someone closed their open UI, you can always fork the last open version, which at least gives you an even start.
If Twitter 𝕏 were to switch to ActivityPub... I'd actually worry about people flocking back to 𝕏, back to their old networks and recommendation algorithms. Guess it's no longer possible, since 𝕏 pretty much destroyed the old Twitter environment, but I'd still worry... and with Elon wanting to make 𝕏 a "social network for everything", that sounds dangerously close to ActivityPub.
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.
You have no way of verifying that the client is only doing what it claims. The Open Source community is highly suspicious of proprietary software, doubly so when it's based off of Open Source code.
If youre okay with that then no worries, but ofr myself and many others it's an absolute deal breaker.
To be fair, the client they provide to make bridging more accessible is proprietary, however you can fire up a fresh copy of element and connect it if you want and just use the text interface.
The clients are closed so that they have something to sell and profit. Not everyone can afford to give their time away for free.
you can fire up a fresh copy of element and connect it if you want
you kind of omitted the part where you have to host your own Matrix server in order to benefit from the bridges.
Is there a reason you couldn't use either use a self hosted or the public hosted copy of element or an Android/iOS app and connect it directly to the beeper synapse/dendrite server?
Their clients are just closed forks of element anyways.
I'll take the risk knowing what I know about the Beeper people that I've been working with for over two years.
If you know the team, then that's a pretty good reason to trust them. Only works if you know the team, though.
That's fine... for you, right now.
But I (and probably most users) don't know them, over time people come and go, some even change who they are, businesses get sold. Only open source persists.
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.
I think one difference is that the rate of change in chat apps has slowed down dramatically. When was the last time one of the major apps added a new feature you can't live without anymore? So it might be easier now to keep up.
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 can vouch for this in a small town of like 5k people in zacatecas, Mexico. Everyone including government and businesses uses WhatsApp. You see the logo with phone numbers all over the place.
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.
No, not regionally, as Whatsapp is probably used most. It is more individuals who decided not to use Facebook related products. Luckily, about 90% of my contacts are on Telegram. It's a bit sad that a proprietary product that leaks metadata could be so widely used. If there was going to be a single "one product" I'd rather prefer that to be an open standard protocol. Those protocols exist, but are not in broad use. But the W3C standard for social networking, really needs to also cover chat messengers.
Now? Sure. Back then WhatsApp (before it was bought by Facebook) was replacing SMS nearly everywhere.
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.
The last time I heard the word beeper it referred to a pager. You kids know what a pager was?
think I'm gonna give this a try but the style of writing in the blog post isn't making this easy
👩🚀 Spacebar
Not the one on your keyboard, silly 😜
shudders
Looks like the client isn't, but they do offer a simple-way to self-host the backend (looks like it's "just" a matrix server and a bunch of bridges) and then you can use any open-source matrix client to connect to that. Seems like a pretty good balance of a way to make money and the guts being open enough that one could move if the client/company goes side-ways, while contributing a lot to the open-source community.
Ok but why is the thumbnail a scene from Midsommar…
Probably because the leading image is taken from Midsommar.
This looks like a promising application; and as long as the business models stay sustainable and the company remains ethical; it should be a good place.
I'll bite and queue up.
For… free… seems like people make a very strong effort to not learn a shit from experiences
Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.
Well.. I said 'kinda failed'. Synapse is still way too slow. And the new dendrite server is still not up to spec. Joining large rooms is still gives me a headache. I can't easily protect DDoS or spam accounts. I was forced to basically close registrations my Matrix server. And Dendrite is not yet production ready which is a shame.. Don't get me wrong, I do like Matrix in general. I just hope my previous remarks are taken seriously by their devs.
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.
See my reaction above (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/11834/-/comment/90707)
You can use any matrix client you want with it. The closed source one is just making bridging more straightward and adding some little quality of life features.
Great! Good to hear you use Pidgin! I love using it in the past as well.. I now use Matrix mainly. Should I go back to Pidgin?
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.
Yeah, it's been so long now I don't remember why I stopped using Trillian (and Pidgin). But when it worked, it was so much nicer just to have one program running vs 5.
It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don't even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.
Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.
Same here. And I can't put my finger on it. I always dismissed it as coming of age and lifestyle changes.
I used to use Disa, I think until the FB messenger connection broke? I hate that I have 6 apps in my IMs folder.
Sorry for the follow up question but is it text only or is it a workaround for the video compression as well?
Thanks for sharing, regardless it's promising!
Well universal chat (like universal e-mail) is either going to be a common open protocol (does not seem very likely given Apple and all the other players) or is going to be something like this on the client side. Although its a lot of work, it does seem more possible. The only pity is it can't solve connecting to services that I don't use like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp.
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
Digital market act https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/index_en
Chat apps are only part of it. It will force iOS and android to offer competing app market too.
Oh, I hadn't realized chat apps were covered by it, but that sounds promising! Thanks for the link 🙂
They need to be interoperable. For example if you're on Signal but want to chat with your parents who are on FB Messenger, then you would be able to chat to them via Signal.
You can envision each chat apps as different instances and these communicate to eachother with a common protocol, just like ActivityPub in Lemmy.
That sounds like something that companies are going to do literally everything they can to avoid. I hope this makes them squirm.
That is really going to be interesting, yes! It is seriously needed despite what Apple will say. And if implemented correctly it can still be E2EE but with our own client apps.
Sorry, I'll never use a service asking me upfront my phone number "for security purposes." Fuck off beeper!
Yep, immediately closed the page when I saw that in the sign up.
Zero reason they need my phone number, fuck off
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.
On my end the post had 0 comments lol, but yes I see when I open it in a browser that my app is bugging out
Apparently it's based on matrix bridges, and you can self-host it if you want. Sounds intriguing imo.
It’s not all bad, you’re right. It’s just that this
To use Beeper, you must give the app permission to send and receive messages through other chat networks using your account credentials. By definition, this may be less secure than using other chat apps alone, especially encrypted chat apps like Signal.
Makes me lose interest. I understand the motivation behind it, yes they encrypt e2e but it’s still sacrificing security (or maybe I should say increasing risk)
Self hosting is a good alternative option!
The bridges need to decrypt your messages before encrypting them again to send them to you. This is done in memory, so it's not impossible for your messages to be read by beeper, but quite difficult.
That said, self hosting will always be a safer option. It's just not for everyone
Super easy. Especially since this is all under their control. So they could simply write those messages elsewhere if they wanted to. I’m not saying they do, but it’s technically possible and a walk in the park.
I would generally trust such a company to do it right. But that doesn’t save you when law enforcement and such get involved.
Memory is not storage, so you would need to be logging what's in memory, I guess. Not impossible, but also not trivial either.
Honestly I'm not sure how it could be done, but I'm sure it's possible
I don't care about beeper one way or another, but that bloody image with the post, it needs to die in a fire.
Honestly this app sounds almost too good to be true, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it anyways just in case.
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.