If any of y’all were curious of Beeper when it came out (a Matrix backed chat app) but weren’t able to get an invite for whatever reason, then here ya go! Feel free to ask any questions about it if you got any! (No I don’t work for Beeper, just like this more than Element and self-hosting)
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Privacy policy is vague and when pressed on if he would sell user data along with the service if he sold it, Eric Migicovsky was silent.
He sold Pebble and screwed the workers on the way out.
So how soon does he sell this when it isn’t profitable enough for him? What use is a privacy policy if it can be changed by whoever he sells it to?
Also from what I understand if you aren’t running your own iMessage bridge and using theirs, technically they have access to your username/password or password hash for the service.
Personal experience: Was on waitlist for over a year. Got an email for onboarding. Told to join zoom call. Zoom call notifies me it will be recorded. There was no notification from Beeper that they would be recording onboardings. I declined and hung up the call.
It took them days to reach out and offer a non recorded session. At that point I asked if they would answer privacy related questions and they ignored them. No response. I declined to use their service since.
Personal opinion, with all these sketchy things about Eric Migicovsky and privacy, I’d err on the side of spinning up my own Matrix server and bridges, you know, with blackjack and hookers.
I am using the service, but there’s a lot I don’t like and I’m hoping to spin up my own matrix server and host their bridges on my own machine.
- Beeper cannot send View once messages/media. 2.View once media that is sent on native Signal and WhatsApp are viewable forever through Beeper.
- There is no way to delete chats/messages
- Read receipt settings are not respected in signal & WhatsApp, and read receipts are always sent.
Looks like the code is dead.
“Error: Referring user has invited too many other users recently. Please try again later”
If anyone has one to spare, I’d appreciate it.
Any company that I have to give my username and password for a third party service (and especially one as important as icloud/imessage) ill take a hard pass.
Awesome take. What company are you talking about, and why are you saying that here? Beeper does not take or want your iCloud password.
Beeper does want you to proxy your iCloud account through a Mac on their network for iMessage. You are logging into your iCloud account through their site. They are in effect using Mac minis in a farm to provide the service based on what I looked into (including self hosting it, but then you can’t use a beeper app, you need your own)
https://help.beeper.com/chat-networks/imessage?from_search=125277302
Is there a desktop app for Linux?
Yes, there is a Linux desktop Electron app. Beeper provides the below links to download Beeper clients on Beeper’s Download page.
The source code for the above clients are not available though. Beeper’s self-host repo claims that the clients are closed-forks of Element’s Android, iOS, Desktop, and Web apps.
However, Beeper’s self-host Github repo outlines the steps required to self-host Beeper’s web service, which is essentially a Synapse Matrix server, Mautrix bridges, and other bridges/bots/services to help run the Matrix Server and connect the Matrix Server to other services.
Nice. While I’d prefer a native app, electron is better than nothing.
Agreed. It would also be nice if they provided the source code, especially since its just a fork of an opensource project. Hopefully Beeper is at least up-streaming new features, bug fixes, etc.
Is this another half-solution for Discord or is it against Discord TOS and can get you banned? Either it only works in group chats or it’s against their TOS. Which is it?
I’m pretty sure beeper is against TOS if they’re using the Matrix bridge I think they’re using.
Beeper is using its own bridge.
