Universal Chat Application, Beeper, Will Be Available To Everyone (For Free) In A Matter Of Weeks.
blog.beeper.com
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!
But how do you know that the frontend is trustworthy? People assume that frontends only talk to one backend.
Web should have thought people otherwise, but for most people it’s pretty indistinguishable from magic.
I was about to say, I do this already with Matrix.
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!
🚩🚩🚩
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.
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.
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?
I'm not sure where this text is that you're referring to.
It looks like they're slides from a powerpoint style presentation.. in the following frames, the light grey text is legible. Still, not a good way to present that data, heh. Stuff like that irks me so bad
Element seems like a perfectly good client to me.
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.
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.
Proprietary clients.
I don't understand the concern here.
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.
I'll take the risk knowing what I know about the Beeper people that I've been working with for over two years.
“I know these guys, trust me” is not a valid security assessment.
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.
Thankfully all of the Matrix bridges they created for Beeper are open source.
Ok, ok, I get it... but I'm still wary of a business model based on closed clients. Guess we'll see how it goes.
Sounds reasonable to me
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.
Yeah I'm excited about it. Dubious and skeptical, but excited too.
You are asking the right questions, keep digging deeper! Ban all Karma and abolish all mods and admins!
Self-host an instance with no karma and no mods.
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.
Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.
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 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.
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.
Afaik, that isn't in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.
The last time I heard the word beeper it referred to a pager. You kids know what a pager was?
Yes.
Lol.
I owned one for a while.
It's how you used to buy weed.
Correct: It was the dealers best friend.
I had a pager in highschool. 🧓
That brought up some memories I had suppressed lol.
It's what those ancient iPads, I think they were called b'oks had right? ;-)
Some time ago I found my old CocaCola Beeper. That time might've been 10+ years ago...
Lol.
Kinda funny how quickly those disappeared when cell phones came along.
The biggest question of all,- Is it Open source ?
My phone will only installs opensource apps.
All of the Matrix bridges, written for use with Beeper, are open source.
Translation: "no"
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.
?
If you have to name the parts that are open-source, then you're not open-source.
think I'm gonna give this a try but the style of writing in the blog post isn't making this easy
shudders
I guess the target demographic is tweens?
Now called 𝕏ns... (too soon?)
Ok but why is the thumbnail a scene from Midsommar…
Came here to ask this... (Also love that movie tho)
Probably because the leading image is taken from Midsommar.
For… free… seems like people make a very strong effort to not learn a shit from experiences
Right this sounds like giving all of my personal messages to one more entity.
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.
Pidgin. That failed. Then we have matrix. That kinda failed. And now beeper?
I don't know..
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.
Idk, that’s more of a “not yet finished” thing rather than “failed” imo
yea.. you are right. It "sort of failed" at some point, because I'm waiting for Matrix to solve these issues for more then 6 years now.. basically since the start..
Beeper is Matrix in a trenchcoat, judging by their Github page.
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)
Well... I'm using pidgin right now.
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.
This looks like a modern Trillian. It's about time.
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.
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.
I was a Trillian beta tester as well.
Thank you for your service. Those really were the days.
Edit: not dismissing your current work. This place is pretty nice too :)
Welcome :)
Would beeper give me access to iMessage without having an iDevice?
Yes
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!
Text, images, videos...I believe there is, or will be soon, video conferencing.
My parents are going to be getting a lot more dog videos soon!
Damn...I'm going to be getting a lot of dog videos from my parents.
Yes! One of the main reasons lots of people use Beeper
Anyone have any thoughts on the privacy and security aspect of this?
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.
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
This one I hadn't heard about until now, do you have a link to some more information?
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.
Can you explain how this affects chat apps? What do they need to implement?
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.
Oh, I hadn't realized chat apps were covered by it, but that sounds promising! Thanks for the link 🙂
Isn't Apple restricting their part of that to EU citizens?
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.
And the cost is simply your privacy and security
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
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
How is it difficult for Beeper to read unencrypted messages from memory?
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
You mean you don't want to go back to the Blackberry model?
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
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.
Applicable XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
Beeper is built on top of Matrix, so it's not actually creating a new standard here.
Been using their bridges for over 2 years, super happy that I no longer need WhatsApp installed on my phone.
If you're like me and live in a country where a shitty chat application is required to be able to function in society, software like this is a breath of fresh air. The bridges are also super stable and incredibly well written.
Note: to be clear, I don't use beeper itself, but use their open source bridges (what beeper is using internally) on my own self hosted Matrix server.
The one thing that sucks about bridging and is never likely to be solved is voice calls through bridges. Theres really no good way to implement it as you would essentially need to have the bridge call you through matrix after you get a WhatsApp call.
Yes, this is very correct.
As a person who's been using said bridges as his primary form of contact for years, it's very difficult to tell people: "Hey, I'm not actually reachable on Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram, please just call me instead".
As a result, I have a backup "net phone" in one of my cupboards with each of those apps installed. If I'm dealing with a particularly stubborn person I have to use it as a fall back.
So, while I love these bridges, your comment is completely valid and anyone thinking of using them should be aware of that.
TLDR, my Matrix chats are filled with:
Yeah this is especially difficult if you're dealing with people overseas who have generally bad cellular voice service. I've had to relaunch whatsapp in another profile on my phone just to answer their calls.
Yep. Shame that we're so reliant on shit like this.
It gets even funnier when the other person can't even distinguish between a phone call and a whatsapp voice call.
Yeah, as a result I just see matrix + Tulir's bridges as a system that I've deployed just for me.
I get all my chat networks in one place, and others get to see me online on their networks of choice. Not perfect, but not the worst.
And it's leagues ahead of Trillian and the rest of those older solutions.
I remember trying to setup matrix bridges using these exact repositories a while ago!
So if this company does the dirty job behind like server management and brings it nicely packaged as product, I'm fine with this. I'm tired of having to install more than 2-3 apps (lots of families abroad) just to communicate.
Meh, there is always some kind of feature it's missing that I want from the official app or one of it's competitors. I tried it for a while but ultimately went back to my regular apps.
Not in my case. I don't care about the bells and whistles that messenging apps keep adding, I just want to send and receive messages.
I used to say that too. I loved good old SMS. Then I got a job with a metal roof and suddenly I needed something to work over wifi
Having a metal roof doesn't mean you need stickers or chat backgrounds - even the minimal features of Whatsapp and co in a generic app is fine for me.
"pebble notification support" then show just the generic default support with no action? (No black dot on the right). I can reply to WhatsApp messages using the pebble but here doesn't look like, seems just basic support handled by the pebble app
Pretty funny too, considering they guy behind Beeper is also the original guy behind Pebble.
Been self hosting their iMessage matrix bridge for awhile now and it's great
This scans as VCs trying to enclose the internet. If you wanted a communications protocol standard
ActivityPub is more of a social network protocol rather than a messaging protocol. It assumes most data sent through it will get public by default and has very little encryption set up for it, let along E2EE. Now Matrix is a better use case for an open protocol like that and also offers bridges between other chat networks (I wouldn't be surprised if Beeper has Matrix under the hood).
it is matrix yes! and they’re contributing back to the upstream bridges
from their website:
It's almost not even fair to say they're merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.
It's also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it's been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.
There’s no reason any of the fields have to be sent cleartext, except maybe the inreplyto property
This is using matrix. You can even connect to it from any matrix client.
End-to-end encryption is still a work in progress there, but also that's more of a social media protocol than a chat protocol.
So much for waiting on the wait-list.... But I'm excited!!!!
tell me how this is better than simply changing all my usernames to "CorsicanGuppy is only on Jabber now, so reach out there" and shutting them all down.
(Actually I liked when pidgin worked, as I could receive on walled platforms and respond on open platforms)
But still, continuing to use closed platforms allows them to perpetuate. Sendmail killed bitnet, and we need to only continue that trend.
Just a shame their android app needs play services for notifications, even though Element upstream does not
Got in yesterday. iMessage is working fine through it. I wonder for how long if this gets traction.
I love beeper - very excited for people to get access to it
These universal chat apps often do not offer all of the features the underlying apps have. Which makes sense but is probably a reason they never get massively adopted.
Everyone uses what'sapp in the UK, and from what I understand, other countries. It's the US that seems to have a weird attachment to iMessage.
The faceblocked and facebanned don't and can't. Open chat matters
Overall it's been pretty good. I mainly needed it to stop the problem of having an Android phone and MacBook, where sometimes texts from iPhone users "slip" to Messenger on my laptop and I don't see them until I'm at my computer. I cant get it to take over my native Android messages, and it glitches when I get a call on WhatsApp where I have to open WhatsApp manually to answer, but still worth it.
Is this something like texts.com?
There was a bit in the Office about this... 🐶
WUPHF!
Why juggle multiple messaging apps when you can have all your conversations in one place? SocialSmartly is the solution you've been waiting for. 😍