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Universal Chat Application, Beeper, Will Be Available To Everyone (For Free) In A Matter Of Weeks. (blog.beeper.com)
submitted 3 years ago* by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.

The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.

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[–] 33 points 3 years ago (15 children)

There's reasons people moved away from multi-network apps like Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin... They were always playing catch-up with the official clients, and frequently broke when there were server-side changes. Protocols for proprietary messaging apps were (and still are) undocumented. I'm not convinced they've actually solved any of these issues.

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  • [–] 29 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

    If Beeper does become a successful business though, there'll be a full time development team "playing catch-up" with money behind them. It's interesting if you read this that they're rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

    They're also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

    Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.

    I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

    Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I'm not sure what'd they'd be doing differently to what Trillian did.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago

    I think one difference is that the rate of change in chat apps has slowed down dramatically. When was the last time one of the major apps added a new feature you can't live without anymore? So it might be easier now to keep up.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago* (9 children)

    Huh, in my opinion people simply moved away, because the underlying messenger were used less and less. Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    Not "everyone" uses Whatsapp though - I deleted mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I know of a few others who also did so. As far as I know Whatsapp has still never changed their T&C to pass metadata upstream to Facebook.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    This is really region dependent. In Europe (or at least the Netherlands) almost everybody with a smartphone uses Whatsapp

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Talk to anyone in latin america, you must use whatsapp. There's no avoiding it. Some have tried Telegram a while ago, but most have reverted back to their usual whatsapp or facebook messenger. It's crazy.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    No, not regionally, as Whatsapp is probably used most. It is more individuals who decided not to use Facebook related products. Luckily, about 90% of my contacts are on Telegram. It's a bit sad that a proprietary product that leaks metadata could be so widely used. If there was going to be a single "one product" I'd rather prefer that to be an open standard protocol. Those protocols exist, but are not in broad use. But the W3C standard for social networking, really needs to also cover chat messengers.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.

    People moved around, but often still use several apps even today. You might have a "main" app you use with friends (this used to be MSN Messenger for me back in the day; now it's Facebook Messenger), but there may be other people you chat to that use other apps. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, Viber, Signal, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Skype, Kik... I feel like there's actually more major apps today than there used to be.

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