this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
88 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37720 readers
478 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can use any Matrix client with Beeper, you don't have to use theirs.
Regardless, there's nothing stopping you from recreating the same stack using the available tools.
What makes their service unique are the bridges. Download their sources, compile them, and then pair them with any server client combo you want.
If you insist on using their stack, you can still use an OSS client. They chose not to make their client open source as it is, by design, for their service only.
They're trying to run a business aimed at people who don't care about open source, and want the same closed source experience they get from their other chat apps but with inter connectivity between third party services.
If you want the latter without any closed source code, you can just go and do that. They've released all the important parts.
Edit: Here's a guide to self hosting beeper.
What is this "closed source experience" you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, especially when their stated goal is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!
Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don't really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I'm actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.
I can answer that: it's the "I don't care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people" experience.
From the looks of it, it's as secure as having WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/ProtonMail doing "E2EE" through each app's servers, and never knowing whether the client did the encryption right, or if it sent the keys to the server for messages to get intercepted... well, except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway.
Closed source doesn't help with that though, you don't have to care about privacy in open source.
They are working on on-device bridges that preserve e2ee, but making the client closed source kind of defeats the purpose here.
Closed source helps with the second part, the connecting with a majority of people using the same closed source platform (then different people use different platforms, which is where we are now... but the DMA might solve that).
On-device bridges could be nice if they included that in the OpenSource part.
The platform is open, including the part that connects to other closed source platforms. It's just Matrix and open source bridges after all. And making the client app closed souce doesn't help with any of that.
I'm sorry if I'm a bit pedantic about this, but it seems like you're describing an upside to closed source software that's just not there.
Too pedantic 😉
I was trying to explain that people on closed source platforms, right now, get:
That's the experience I understand Beeper is trying to compete with... and make money in the process.
Closing the client, could help them differentiate above the competition by better integrating into their own infrastructure, still keeping a simple configuration, and charging for it, while people who buy into the security theatre, woldn't notice a difference in that respect. Expanding to selling some user metadata, or sniffing the bridges, would be an extra.
Nothing about what you just wrote has anything to do with closed source software though. You could just as well say that closed source helps them predict the future or draw shinier unicorns. It doesn't!
Maybe you mean tightly coupled, stripped-down, preconfigured or vertically integrated, but you can do that just as well with open source software. No one is forcing them to make a general purpose chat app or offer the ability to choose a different server. It's just a matter of being able to see, verify and modify the code.
This is the only thing that comes close imo. But they stated specifically that they don't want to make money with the chat app itself, so it doesn't really work as a justification. They could easily offer server-side premium features or create a closed source premium-only version or extension, it's no reason to make the base app closed source.
They don't have to do that, and they don't afaik. Matrix itself can do proper e2ee just fine, and Beeper is pretty open about the fact that bridges hosted by them have to break e2ee to translate between platforms. They'd only need theater if their closed source app actually has some bad code in it, which is kind of my point.
Again: Their Matrix server and bridges are open source right now, and it wouldn't stop them from doing what you're describing.
I just can't help it. 😜