Show HN: Chat with your contacts on different platforms without an app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Chat with your contacts on different platforms without an app

fiotron.com

33 pointssoheil17 comments

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Hey, this looks super cool, I'm very interested! But when I tried to sign up, I got a message:

> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

> If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.

https://i.ibb.co/kmmvJ2R/Screen-Shot-2021-09-03-at-6-28-42-P...

Same.

How can you provision and use a phone number for each contact? What if I have hundreds or thousands of contacts? Doesn't this use up all available phone numbers?

What about when I stop using the service - are these numbers able to be re-used?

What about security or privacy implications of the next person messaging my old contacts accidentally?

I think each of their phone numbers are reusable by also keying against who the sender is. So if they own the number 555-1234, Alice can sign up and have texts to that number go to Bob, and Carol can sign up and have texts to that number go to Eve. This way, everyone who uses the service can each have as many contacts as the service has phone numbers, and it will work without issue.

What if Alice wants to send messages to Carol?

The number Alice uses to message Carol doesn’t have to be the same as the number Carol uses to message Alice.

From their landing page: > Simply create an account and connect your social media accounts.

You already have to have an account setup on the target platform, they won't provision one for you.

> This platform is built on top of Matrix an open source project. Every user on Fiotron is also a user on our Matrix homeserver. Using various Matrix bridges you can link your social media/chat accounts. Once connected your recent contacts are synced and each assigned a phone number. Sending and receiving a text message to these phone numbers routes the message to the corresponding contact via the Matrix bridge. A list of contacts is sent to your phone including contact's name, profile image and aforementioned phone number.

Looks really awesome! Now I can get rid of WhatsApp and still be in those groups

So I was pretty hyped about this. Already looking forward to throw some money at this product and use it. But the I couldn’t even get past signup.

> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

> If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.

Yeah, it sure sounded too good to be true.

Sorry fixing this now, please try again in a few minutes.

Still happening... :/

A day later… still happening

I love the idea of this! Recently I was reminiscing about a time when it was easy to unify all your chat networks into one place. With people scattered across various platforms it’s handy to have something to bring it all together to one place

From which country the phone numbers are generated? Can you generate EU phone numbers?

Its based on sms, that will be costly to.

And thanks to T-Mobile, at&t, Verizon it could just stop working with a2p

Depends where you live, in France I have unlimited texts for 2€/Mo

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