Your thoughts on Beeper
Your thoughts on Beeper
Following the news that "Beeper becomes first RCS chat app for iPhones, introducing support for Google Messages with RCS" what are your thoughts on the app and on the RCS forced by Google? Is it worth a try? Or should I stick to Matrix and Signal?
Edit: source
Doesn't look like it's FOSS, so I'm not even going to bother trying it.
20The clients are closed source, but they use Matrix bridges to connect to various messaging services, and those are in fact open sourced.
9Sorry, just want to make sure others read this properly. I think you meant
The clients aren't
closedopen source.They are closed source forks of Element's desktop/mobile/web apps.
17
I didn't know anything about Beeper. I've signed up for an invite. It looks like it could be good.
6As I mentioned above there are also public matrix servers offering this.
The experience is a bit less seamless and fewer chat apps are supported, typically only the most popular ones like WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram.
3Me too, I'm mostly interested to see how the iMessage implementation works with Android...
The only person I would message with this would be my girlfriend... And even with the option on hand we are pretty comfortable using Telegram, so it is more like a curiosity on my side.
2
I don't really trust non Foss messaging services, I rather manually bridge everything into matrix
5Looks very interesting. I particularly am interesting in how they are merging all of the chat clients into one client. From what I can tell it looks like they are using Matrix Bridges or something on the back end?
5It is indeed matrix bridges.
4
I'll stick to signal
4Privacy policy looks decent in the app stores. Not as good as Signal/Telegram but better than a lot of the other apps it could replace
4It's very convenient. Can be hosted yourself as well: https://github.com/beeper/self-host . I only use it for non-critical comms. The critical ones I keep on my own matrix server + bridges
2I've been using it for a couple weeks but haven't used RCS, so I can't say specifically about that. Overall though, it's still a work in progress and is not as polished but it gets the job done (more or less). If you're really concerned about privacy using their closed source app, you can just host your own bridges in your Matrix server (the app is the only proprietary part of Beeper, the protocol is just Matrix). The app doesn't support logging in from another Matrix account, so you'll have to stick with Element (I think Element derivatives would work too) when using your own bridges. But that's probably a better option given that their own app lacks a few features.
2I love the concept, though since it breaks encryption, I wouldn't use it for anything sensitive. However, once it supports Skype, I bet I'll use it a lot.
1It's proprietary, therefore I have no interest in it. The fact that it uses Matrix on the server end isn't noteworthy because software freedom is about what I run on my local hardware, not what the company runs on theirs.
I would be interested to know what changes/additions their client and server make to the standard Matrix experience. I know their proprietary client is coupled to their service but can I use a standard Matrix client with their service? If normal Matrix clients cannot interact with it then the use of Matrix on the server end is but an implementation detail and not relevant to users.
1IIRC it breaks end to end encryption so not interested
1Instead of Beeper,I'm using SocialSmartly on my laptop.Simplify your social media management by integrating multiple accounts from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram all in one place with SocialSmartly.
1