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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

Are there any open source clients for this out there? Also, if someone were to build that, what are the protocols one would even use to get these things talking to each other and reconciling the different accounts quirks

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I think most of these are built using Matrix: https://matrix.org. They have connections with most providers like iMessage, FB, Instagram, etc

I don't think they use that anymore though? From what I've heard it all happens locally now with a proprietary solution.

Interesting, i'd be curious to learn more. It's been awhile since I looked into Beeper/Texts type apps.

at least from talking to Eric at a meetup, I think some are still on remote implementations. I know texts definitely needs to do the iMessage implementation locally, but they're moving everything client-side, which to me as a thunderbird user, makes the most sense. I just wish we could have something like libpurple again that would allow me to finally get back to the everything-in-one-app paradigm

ok is there an "open source beeper" that has emerged that i can play with? cant use amber because closed source

The bridges made for Beeper are all open source (https://github.com/mautrix/), so you can set up your own Matrix server with bridges and use any open source Matrix client (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/).

Besides Beeper, the only consumer bridge hosting service I'm aware of is Element One, but it's only barely maintained, so I'd definitely recommend self-hosting over that.

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