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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
You cannot see how the app works, cannot change how it works, cannot tell anyone how it works…
Huge deal for something as basic and important as interpersonal communication.