2y ago

What do you think about beeper?

www.beeper.com Beeper — All your chats in one app. Yes, really.

A single app to chat on iMessage, WhatsApp, and 13 other chat networks. You can search, snooze, or archive messages. And with a unified inbox, you’ll never miss a message again.

It promises to be the one-in-all chatting app, based on matrix, providing compatibility to other apps (Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp etc.) through bridges.

So what do you think, from a privacy point of view and also user friendliness on the other hand?

Privacy Guides @lemmy.one

monty @lemmy.one

2y ago

Beeper Chat App

www.beeper.com

85 19

25 comments

I don’t think very highly of a cloud based app asking me for my credentials for every other cloud based app I used.
- This.

if Lorem Ipsum is the first information i have about an app, i don't need to think about it. This is from their webpage 👉
- Oopsie, forgot the fake reviews!
- Atleast it is consistent /s

“For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the Beeper web service, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol.”
So, not really end to end for most common use-cases.
- Yeah I got my invite last week. But between the time it was announced and looking into it, I’ve balked and won’t use it.
  That said I’m considering self hosting
  https://github.com/beeper/self-host
- I was thinking it was something like what pidgin does on desktop, adapted for mobile, and was highly enthusiastic, but realized it works using matrix bridges and doesn't process locally...
  Well, at least it can be self hosted.
  
  Given this is !privacy and the advertise as front page features both “works will all your messaging apps” and “end to end encryption”, it seems important to flag currently those aren’t mutually compatible.
  It’s not their fault the apps don’t have e2e APIs, it’s a tough problem, but the secrecy and privacy guarantee is just “trust us to stick to our policy”. And they’re a start-up, tooling isn’t perfect (or even exist), mistakes happen, etc
  Their self-hosting looks interesting, but then it said to use your own clients too, which took the fun out of that.

In order to provide the service, Beeper collects device information, including OS, hardware, public IP addresses, network routing information, information on the installed Beeper client, and other device settings.
🤔

bloat

Also the service is 18+. Most likely to avoid stricter data protection around children data.

Source: https://www.beeper.com/terms

This seems too good to be true, but deserves to be tested. Apparently, you have the option to self host your web service, in case you don't want to give them your data.
- It is. But their client only connects to beeper bridges. So you gotta roll your own client too

I like it so far, seems to work reliably and the client is leaps better than any other Matrix client on iOS.
Haven’t checked out the option to self host the bridges yet but it’s on my list.

Isn't this just adding another potential point of failure to every single service you add to it? Hard pass.

I've been on the waitlist for a while and am excited to get through. It may suck but it's worth testing. The privacy issues aren't ideal but it doesn't seem like they sell your data.

- The only good idea Ryan unironically had

25 comments