I want to use Beeper, but funneling all my communications through hosted bridges (especially so Signal) is gonna be a nope, until they release more very deep technical and verifiable information about how on-device bridges work.<p>I'm big on unified messaging from the libpurple days, but now 99% of my chats are in Signal so perhaps I am just not the target demographic for this.
Interesting! Anyone here remember Pidgin? It was such a fantastic app for chatting with friends on AIM, MSN, ICQ, gchat (XMPP), and IRC all from one interface. It even had an "off the record" (OTR) plugin that was an early example of end-to-end encryption.<p>It was a good illustration of how an open source app could surpass all the proprietary alternatives because it wasn't subject to the same incentives as a commercial company. Although obviously all those companies wised up and killed XMPP...
I've been an early access user for a few months and I'm <i>really</i> enjoying Beeper -- I hope they continue to deliver like this and can scale the operations as needed.<p>I currently use through it: Telegram, WhatsApp, RCS (Android Messages), Signal.<p>Beeper is built on Matrix and their client is based on Element but I would say the experience is slightly better than native; for example I prefer how client verification works in Beeper over vanilla Element.<p>Congrats on the open beta!
Why do we need a Google account for this service ? What's the point of allowing an app to be independent and E2EE if everything is also linked to Google Accounts? When will the software community stop automatically utilizing the most dominate services for every implementation Is there a service similar to Beeper that doesn't require a Google account?
I want to try it, but I don't want to become dependent on it if it will transition to a paid product in the future (It's cool, but I probably wouldn't pay for it).<p>How long will it remain free to use?
I'm happy about every new Matrix client! It would be cool if they would release it as FOSS so it could be used generically. There's a painful lack of (average, non-technical) user friendly Matrix clients.