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.
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.
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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.
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.
And the cost is simply your privacy and security
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.
Oh, I hadn’t realized chat apps were covered by it, but that sounds promising! Thanks for the link 🙂
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.
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.
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!
“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.
So much for waiting on the wait-list… But I’m excited!!!
Got in yesterday. iMessage is working fine through it. I wonder for how long if this gets traction.
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.
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.
There was a bit in the Office about this… 🐶
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?
