Ironically i joined because of iMessage, which got almost immediately ripped from me because Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple (... sorry, annoyed). When i joined the service was great, but the last couple months (basically since the iMessage drama) it has been weirdly unstable. I see a lot of encrypted messages (as in, the message doesn't receive properly and all the receiver sees is "message encrypted"), images failing, gifs failing, generally bad behavior when connection is poor, etc.

I was interested when i joined because i thought they were just going to offer a service i could pay for, like Kagi. Yet now this feels like another enshittification just waiting to happen.

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Are you still happy?

Even friends don't spend $150M on friends for no reason. Automattic is doing well, but they don't have $150M to drop (plus future salaries, hosting, etc) just to help someone save face.

I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.

This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.

From the article, not a rumor.

My IM situation is only currently tolerable because all of my frequent contacts are either via WhatSapp or twitter DM.

Even having the handful you do would be enough to make -me- want to consolidate.

(this is not at all meant to be an argument that -you- should want it, but I think is at least a good case that there will be people out there in your -situation- that will)

Beeper is just a skin over Matrix, and they are hosting and managing the bridges for you. So that when any of protocols they support breaks because the other company changes something (or intentionally breaks things to stop connections from clients they don't want), Beeper fixes it rather than you having to wait for the open source community to do so and you implement that fix. Which who knows how long either scenario will take.

Paying for Beeper is not having to manage the self hosting, which many are not willing to do. Because as with most open source solutions, it's not very simple and is intimidating for many. Not to mention having some box open to the internet, and having to maintain security updates for that box.

I would love for libpurple to come back and make these things relatively simple. But the reality is that companies have walled off their gardens to control the experience, and many other reasons ranging from greed to security to spam mitigation.

Unless you go to the effort to tell people that you route your SMS messages to e-mail and therefore reply in-your-own-time (hours/days/weeks delay), the people trying to contact you aren't going to expect that: they're going to expect you to reply much sooner. I'd be out of a job if my boss' panicked SMS messages about how our prod website is down went to email instead of my phone.

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Any kind of "universal" messaging platform that anyone can use to send anyone a message needs to allow recipients to set how maximially intrusive those messages are - but senders might also want a way to set how minimally intrusive those messages are. Those requirements cannot be easily reconciled in a way that protects privacy and prevents abuse while also allowing anonymous and unsolicited messages or senders. So far the "best" way to do that today is by segregating senders (not recipients) by system (e.g. private SMS for high-intrusive; less-private-but-guarded e-mail for low-intrusive; public social-media, etc).

Consider services that tried to work-around that, such as LinkedIn's paid messaging feature - which didn't exactly go very well.

Enshittification is the default path for leaders with MBA brain, but some still manage to avoid it.

Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.

Also they hire all around the world where $100k/yr is the exception and not the norm.

My own personal site is static HTML mirrored against Cloudflare, I do definitely see the advantage when it's there :)

Another application is resource-constrained devices. I love the netbook form-factor, but my little Intel N200 machine buckles under the strain of running what amounts to six web browsers simultaneously (because everything is Electron now) in order to receive notifications from all the chat networks I have people on.

It can also be nice to have a kind of buffer layer in between you and the chat network, which doesn't necessarily have your interests in mind. For example, Facebook Messenger's Android app somehow managed to wake up my phone's screen every time it received a notification, despite my turning off every related setting and permission I could find. So I put it behind Beeper and the problem is gone.

They usually call it E2B (end to bridge)

if I'm running the bridges local-to-the-client (I am, on my McBook) it's not meaningfully any less e2ee. encryption happens in the matrix client (running on the laptop), the encrypted message is sent to the homeserver on localhost, the bridge (on localhost) grabs the encrypted message and decrypts it, then the bridge re-encrypts it and sends it to Whatsapp (or wherever). the content of the message is as secure over the wire with this approach as using first-party apps directly

if one hosts their own bridges they're person-in-the-middling themselves and should take all the necessary precautions. if they're using beeper's hosted options they have to delegate read/write ability to beeper (though I think the signal and imessage bridges might be device-local), and beeper is clear about that.

Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients.

It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.

A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face.

Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on.

How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m.

Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this would need board approval, and a good board needs ... rigorous dd.

I don't think that's true at all. I'd never heard of Beeper before their integration with iMessage and the fact that it was disabled by Apple was seen as a negative on Apple, not Beeper. They raised their profile, now they're cashing out.

My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.

Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.