Man, I have been loving Beeper so far.
No need for an always on Mac with Beeper. I was previously using Airmessage and then Bluebubbles in this manner on an old Mac Mini. Have been on Beeper for a couple of months now. They use their own Macs as servers.
Alas, until they open it up more, it’s kinda useless for anyone that isn’t already using it
How do you mean? I’m actually kinda interested since I have friends on WhatsApp and Signal. Seems like it would make things more convenient by combining both messengers.
Is there a downside I’m missing?
Edit: they break E2E encryption for forwarding, so no dice :( https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encrypted-chat-networks-like-imessage-signal-whatsapp
No, it’s very useful. They open-sourced the bridge, so you can easily add it to your own Matrix server: https://github.com/mautrix/gmessages/tree/main
@Display Name@lemmy.ml is right, confirmed via their official FAQs: https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encrypted-chat-networks-like-imessage-signal-whatsapp
When sending and receiving Signal, iMessage and WhatsApp messages, Beeper’s web service acts as a relay. 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.
I don’t know how tech savy you are but I selfhost Matrix and almost exclusively use bridges to talk with friends. I feel comfortable breaking e2e on a system I control and the all-in-one-place messaging is pretty sweet, like Pidgin used to be.
If you are already comfortable self-hosting other services, Matrix doesn’t really impose any additional complexity IMO and the bridges I use seem to be very stable.
Does Beeper offer anything that Matrix bridges don’t?
Is there a Matrix Bridge for RCS? RCS is neither SMS nor is it Google Chat.
Edit: this isn’t to claim Beeper is better. Just stating that technically there is something on offer that Matrix Bridges doesn’t support. I think I’d still prefer Matrix with Bridges over Beeper.
Edit: apparently Beeper is based on Matrix. Can’t confirm whether their own repo would introduce any dependencies for their bridge that isn’t in the main repo for Matrix. So it’s hard to say.
Yes. “Beeper adding support” is really them making a new Matrix bridge, and they open source all of their bridges, so just use theirs. It’s here: https://github.com/mautrix/gmessages/tree/main
So that does change things, but doesn’t necessarily confirm it would natively work with Matrix (though doesn’t discount it either). Is there confirmation that mautrix bridges are cross-compatible to matrix? Technically Beeper is built off of mautrix which is based on Matrix but isn’t necessarily the same as Matrix. I don’t know much about Beeper as I only learned of it today.
Beeper adds more polish, meaning that you don’t need to manually configure bridges or maintain the Synapse server. It also gives you better indications of what bridge a room is from than Element does. If you know how to set up a Matrix server, you probably don’t need it, but it’s nice to have the option.
