Hacker News Reader

Comment by erohead | Hacker News Reader

Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

Congrats on the new position and future of Beeper. I think Automattic will be a great home and I've been impressed with what they've done with other projects as well.

Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?

Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...

> Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?

Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.

IIRC matrix and its foundation? were hurting for funding a while back and might yet still be. Did Beeper contribute to it or does Automattic plan to?

We did: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/06/beeper-joins-the-foundation/

Bravo!

Hopefully a more "exciting day" for the users than when Pebble sold out to Fitbit...

> Exciting day for Beeper!

Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of the WhatsApp/iMessage/Messenger walled gardens? And if that were to happen, do you foresee Beeper still existing as a standalone product? Do you foresee there actually being a need for Beeper versus, say, a rejuvenated (and very open) Pidgin?

Yeah, neither do I...although I do prefer to be optimistic.

If you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin.

Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.

> Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.

Is the added investment necessary to scale out specific features, or is it to address challenges related to profitability?

What he meant was they were running out of money.

> 50% of our product is already open source

What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?

Since now you have more resources, do you plan on open sourcing your whole solution, or will Beeper still be "half" open source? As far as I'm aware you still cannot use the Beeper client with your own self-hosted Matrix instance, and there's quite a lot of Beeper-only features that never became Matrix spec proposals. Is there a plan to make these features available to the whole Matrix ecosystem? Should I be worried that open source development of the mautrix bridges will cease, to focus on a commercial product?

The only thing the beeper client itself brings over your garden variety matrix client is a coat of paint. It’ll make group chats between you, your friend and the bot that’s forwarding everything look like a private chat. Or the chat between a phone # and you will look like the contact name and you and are talking (and if that contact changes so will the chat).

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.

FWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.

I haven’t used pidgin in years but does that Teams plugin really work? I’ve seen projects try to integrate it into matrix and drop off because it was too hard.

It did last I knew, but I don't use teams so I don't know for certain.

You are one lucky person and I envy you.

Yep it's a great place to be especially when the CEO from a company punches down on a volunteer project on the day that CEO sold their company for 125 Million USD... /s

Haha sorry I meant lucky as in not having to use Teams.

Yeah I know, I was just using the opportunity to vent some frustration :)

Is 125 m the actual number? I would be surprised if they got more than 10.

That's what tech crunch and others are reporting https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...

Wow, almost half of Automattic's annual revenue!

Works for me!

Although I'm the plugin's developer, so I may be a little biased :D

Grim, I apologize. I spoke too soon. I didn't mean to offend you or demean pidgin. I was reacting too harshly to the parent.

Thank you for apologizing.

Also worth noting that some past Automattic acquisitions have also been open sourced, e.g. Pocket Casts back in 2022. There's a LOT of stuff in the >900 Automattic repos on Github: https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories

Congratulations! Must be an absolute thrill

Reply on news.ycombinator.com