Derin

I always liked their UX, and never noticed any outright bugs?

But, yeah, definitely dislike the Spyware - I recall having to adb shell into the device and manually disable those processes after each update.

Shame they include that, their devices are (otherwise) really great.

Mine is in 6 days, oh boy.

I use Navidrome myself, and I still think it would be nice for people to know a little bit about the software in an update announcement post.

Seems like a very reasonable request, I don’t grok the vitriol in your response.

Same here, my dude… Same here. Why does my back suddenly hurt?

Steam goes down for maintenance at this time every week.

Edit: Tuesdays ~3pm PST

I hope they continue to do good, but am also skeptical.

And, man, I miss the old Gravatar.

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.

I am worried about that acquisition, to be honest.

I’ve been supporting them via Github sponsors for about a year, now - as I only use their open source software; I’ve no intention of touching the service or closed source client.

As a result, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was anxious about their new owners basically telling them “hey, why are you releasing all your bridges for free, anyway?”

Really hope that doesn’t happen, as their bridges have been my primary communication channels for a long time, now. I love not having to keep WhatsApp or Discord installed on my phone.

Fair point, if you’re just against the fact that they wrote a closed source client.

It’s frustrating that closed source software exists, but in this context I’m (personally) okay with it as it funds the development of free software.

I disagree. Beeper’s client is meaningless, it’s the service being offered that has value.

If you don’t mind trusting a third party service with your Matrix instance + bridge hosting, use Beeper.

If you’re into OSS and owning your own tech stack, self host the whole thing.

At no point do you have to use their client for any reason.

You were asking how it interacts with Discord. That is the code.

Beyond that it’s running a version of Synapse and has its own client - the latter being optional.

Just use any open source client. You can literally do that.

And if you don’t trust the company - for any reason - use their code to deploy your own backend.

You can use any Matrix client with Beeper, you don’t have to use theirs.

Regardless, there’s nothing stopping you from recreating the same stack using the available tools.

What makes their service unique are the bridges. Download their sources, compile them, and then pair them with any server client combo you want.

If you insist on using their stack, you can still use an OSS client. They chose not to make their client open source as it is, by design, for their service only.

They’re trying to run a business aimed at people who don’t care about open source, and want the same closed source experience they get from their other chat apps but with inter connectivity between third party services.

If you want the latter without any closed source code, you can just go and do that. They’ve released all the important parts.

Edit: Here’s a guide to self hosting beeper.

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?

Edit: And, please, stop asking questions like “How do they connect to X/Y/Z, anyway?” - just go read the source and see for yourself. These are the good guys working completely in the open, and you’re treating them as if Twitter just wrote a chat app.

It’s open source, here’s the code. It uses the discordgo library to connect to Discord and read your DMs.

e: You’re free to download and deploy the source yourself, and write your own ToS. That’s the nice part of open source software.

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.

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.

Try opening Element Desktop/Web, hitting the “Add” button to the right of your current space’s title (“Home”, if you’re not in a space), and choose “Join Public Room”. From there you can search for room names on Matrix.org (or other homeservers of your choice) - which is kind of the best option right now.

The first point is moot as you can encrypt your data; your host my have it, but they can’t access it.

As far as self hosting goes, yes: DNS registration will generally out you, so if you’re really trying to stay hidden then - as the previous poster mentioned - your best bet is to just make an account on a relatively large server.

Well, at least you gave it your best!