The last time I heard the word beeper it referred to a pager. You kids know what a pager was?
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Been self hosting their iMessage matrix bridge for awhile now and it's great
Been using their bridges for over 2 years, super happy that I no longer need WhatsApp installed on my phone.
If you're like me and live in a country where a shitty chat application is required to be able to function in society, software like this is a breath of fresh air. The bridges are also super stable and incredibly well written.
Note: to be clear, I don't use beeper itself, but use their open source bridges (what beeper is using internally) on my own self hosted Matrix server.
The one thing that sucks about bridging and is never likely to be solved is voice calls through bridges. Theres really no good way to implement it as you would essentially need to have the bridge call you through matrix after you get a WhatsApp call.
Yes, this is very correct.
As a person who's been using said bridges as his primary form of contact for years, it's very difficult to tell people: "Hey, I'm not actually reachable on Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram, please just call me instead".
As a result, I have a backup "net phone" in one of my cupboards with each of those apps installed. If I'm dealing with a particularly stubborn person I have to use it as a fall back.
So, while I love these bridges, your comment is completely valid and anyone thinking of using them should be aware of that.
TLDR, my Matrix chats are filled with:
Person A (WA): Incoming call
Me: I don't have whatsapp, needs to be a normal call :(
Person A (WA): Ok. Calling in five minutes.
Yeah this is especially difficult if you're dealing with people overseas who have generally bad cellular voice service. I've had to relaunch whatsapp in another profile on my phone just to answer their calls.
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Pidgin. That failed. Then we have matrix. That kinda failed. And now beeper?
I don't know..
Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.
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Pidgin didn't use bridges, it tried to be "all the possible clients in one"... with closed source protocols... which went south, fast. It still works for some, though.
Matrix is running just fine, it doesn't have the infinite flexibility of XMPP which made XMPP clients incompatible with each other, so as long as it doesn't jump the shark, it's just a matter of time to drive adoption.
How did Matrix fail?
It's the base for numerous messengers used by governments around the world, it has a userbase of more than 70 million core users (not counting the various closed messengers). Various competitors (e.g. Rocket Chat) have changed their base to Matrix.
And Beeper is Matrix with Bridges (which you absolutely could deploy yourself). In theory anyone could recreate the Beeper functionality with existing other apps/bridges AND be able to communicate with Beeper on their native standard - Matrix.
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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.
This looks like a promising application; and as long as the business models stay sustainable and the company remains ethical; it should be a good place.
I'll bite and queue up.
I don't care about beeper one way or another, but that bloody image with the post, it needs to die in a fire.