Beeper Messaging App That Irked Apple Is Acquired by WordPress.com Owner
Beeper Messaging App That Irked Apple Is Acquired by WordPress.com Owner
Automattic Inc., the internet company behind popular online blogging service WordPress.com, acquired the messaging app at the heart of a recent dispute with Apple Inc.
Automattic purchases Beeper in $125 million deal; CEO to join
https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/
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Well that's some news. If they're good news we will see. I'm a Beeper user but never heard of Texts (stupid name) before, which seem to share the same misson as Beeper. Texts was purchased by Automattic last year (according to the Beeper blog).
What does that mean? Automattic punches with some weight in the chat space now. In general I don't like it if big companies buy small products. However Automattic still seems to bet on the Fediverse, so maybe if the teams from Beeper and Texts can work together on a Matrix-based, open source chat application, we could get something really good.
I've mixed feelings about this whole thing, some shy optimizm, some less shy pessimism.
Well, time will tell.
given that they struck a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to train them on Tumblr data, I'd be wary of using their stuff.
I know what you mean, but I think private chat and public posting are quite distinct. They'd destroy a lot more trust if they sell private messages compared to what they did with Tumblr. Especially if they continue to push local bridges, where they won't be able to read any message (you still have to trust them obviously).
If they push local OpenSource bridges, or if you're willing to self-host your own, then I'd consider using them.
Otherwise, any private "E2E" encrypted messages, will get decrypted on their bridges, and we'll have to play ToS whack-a-mole to find out whether they're fair game to train LLMs or not.
You can just set up a synapse server and bridge all your chats manually btw