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Comment by jamesmunns | Hacker News Reader

I really like Beeper, and congrats to them for getting acquired, but my first reaction is "aw damn how long until the parts I love about Beeper get incredible journey'd away".

The new android app is really good, the desktop app has always been a step up from other Element apps I've used (it is a distant fork, these days), I don't have iMessage, but it works great with Matrix and Signal and WhatsApp a ton of other "rarely used" apps I have.

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Automattic rescued Pocket Casts from NPR, and made them open source. Tumblr from Verizon. In general they're very good stewards.

Oh wow, thank you for posting this! I did not realize that they open sourced Pocket Casts. That is really neat of them.

"Rescued Tumblr" would certainly be news to the remaining users of Tumblr.

Automattic very rarely shuts down any products they acquire, so I'd certainly be less concerned with them as the buyer compared to another company. (Their failure mode for acquisitions tends to be underresourcing them and letting them stagnate, not actually shutting them down.)

>incredible journey'd away

I'm calling Webster's right now.

Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

That link is probably more apropos than you intend, since Automattic also now owns Tumblr and has been a decent steward of it thus far, not shutting it down even though it undoubtedly loses lots of money. Instead, they made a good-faith effort to make it profitable, before putting it in minimal-cost maintenance mode when that didn't work out.

If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.

FWIW, Automatic has bought a few projects I use (PocketCasts, Simplenote) and seem to have been pretty good stewards. For Simplenote they actually reduced the monetization (although a decade after the acquisition they've started remonetizing in a lowkey way which is hopefully sustainable)

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