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.
The clients are closed source, but they use Matrix bridges to connect to various messaging services, and those are in fact open sourced.
Sorry, 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.
Woops, yes indeed, I just corrected my comment!
So why not just use a Matrix client?
Because you’d need to do all the bridges for other clients yourself. There was a post somehwere here on how to do that a few days ago … and it looked complicated.
There are quite a few public servers that have bridges implemented. Sadly the official server list does not say which of them has bridges but just check the websites of some and pick one you like.
So basically, Beeper just hosts a bunch of Matrix bridges and has an app for their server? Can you use their service with another Matrix client?
importantly though Beeper also built a lot of the bridges and maintain a lot more as FOSS
unsure about using a FOSS client with their service, but you can definitely use a FOSS client with their bridges that you host yourself and it’s functionally very similar AFAIK
it’s so weird then to make the app closed source. I would guess that a lot of potential users would care about this and are unhappy with that …
i think it makes sense… that’s the pattern with a lot of FOSS but for-profit: make the hard (but generic) functionality FOSS and then make your “skin” that ties it all together, thing that makes it pretty, the differentiator closed and sell that
I didn’t know anything about Beeper. I’ve signed up for an invite. It looks like it could be good.
As 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.
Me 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.
I don’t really trust non Foss messaging services, I rather manually bridge everything into matrix
Looks 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?
It is indeed matrix bridges.
I’ll stick to signal
Privacy 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
It’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
I’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.
IIRC it breaks end to end encryption so not interested
I 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.
It’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.
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