Beeper is *so close* to being everything I want in a chat client...

If you're anything like me, you miss the good old days of instant messaging. Back when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM for short), MSN Messenger, and ICQ ruled the roost.

But you may have also found running the disparate messaging platforms of the day to be an awful burden on an old Pentium II. In fact, it's not too dissimilar from the state of chat apps today.

However, back then we actually had a solution: a single program (a multi-service chat client) that could connect to these various services and unify the your contacts into a single buddy list.

Enter Beeper. A modern take on the multi-service chat clients of yore (think Trillian, Pidgin, or Empathy).

Beeper is a genuinely nice experience though it does have some hard corners, a few UX issues, and I have some issues with it's architecture. And that includes security concerns.

But despite all of that, it's one app and it connects to your favorite services. Some of the services they advertise supporting include:

• Signal
• Matrix
• Discord
• Instagram
• Facebook Messenger*
• LinkedIn
• WhatsApp
• X
• Telegram
• Slack
• Google Messages (RCS/SMS)
• Google Chat

That's quite a healthy selection, honestly. But there are a few glaring omissions. Snapchat is one of them. Revolt would be another.

My Experience

So my experience with Beeper has been (overall) pleasant. But when writing this, I learned that while the Matrix bridges used to connect your accounts to Beeper are FOSS, the client itself is not.

That's an absolutely enormous disappointment and one that truly tarnishes my last three weeks of using the app.

One issue that I encountered was that the connection to Facebook kept giving me an error and logging me out. The second time I logged in, I got a message saying that "Automated activity was detected and that continued unauthorized use could result in a ban."

Now, that's probably just a scare tactic by Meta to keep people from using third party clients. But given that the only reason I have a Facebook account is so I can help my clients manage their Pages so that senior citizens can (not) see their posts, I literally can't risk getting banned.

My Concerns

In writing this post, I learned even more about the architecture and I have learned some less than awesome things about it:

Security for E2E services

If you were hoping to use Signal, WhatsApp, or Google Chat, I'd recommend against that. These services use End To End (E2E) encryption and, frankly, Beeper's solution for this is more of a workaround. Their Matrix bridges for these services act as a man-in-the-middle.

Let's say your friend Alice is on Signal. Alice sends you a message. But you're on Beeper... so Beeper receives the message from Alice. Then, Beeper will decrypt her message and send it to your client.

Then you reply to Alice. That response goes back to Beeper. Beeper then re-encrypts and forwards that message to Alice.

Needless to say, that kinda defeats the whole purpose of a secure messaging application.

Automattic

Then there's the issue of Automattic. They're the uberchuds that ru(i)n Wordpress. Beeper was acquired by Automattic in January of this year.

Up until recently, the worst thing I could say about Automattic was that Wordpress was an absolute mess.

But given the recent series of unforced errors by their clownish CEO Matt Mullenweg, I'd say that my confidence in the future of Beeper is bearish at best.

Limitations

That brings me to the limitations here. This isn't your father's Trillian. As I mentioned, this isn't a client for these disparate services. The way this works is each supported service is just a Matrix bridge that lives on Beeper's server. These bridges connect to the service on your behalf, and then relays messages to your client app.

Let me be clear: I truly dislike this. This is barely a solution. While you can definitely set up own bridges on your homelab or whatever, this is just a wonky and unnecessarily complex way to build this.

What I want is a program that interfaces directly with the server. You provide your credentials to the app (or log in via oAuth or something) and then the app handles all the security for each platform on device. That's not how Beeper works.

Hard Corners

Another issue I've run up against is that you're signing in to your Beeper.com account and then you link one account for each service to that Beeper account. So you can't have multiple FB Messenger accounts connected at once, for example.

This is an issue for me. I wanted to have my Gardiner Bryant Instagram and my Heavy Element accounts connected. But that's simply not possible with this current architecture.

That's obnoxious.

It's particularly obnoxious when you can't connect another Matrix account. You get your beeper.com Matrix account and that's it. I already have a matrix.org account with contacts and chats spanning back to 2018. I'd like to be able to use that in the Beeper client... but I can't.

The Future

With all that said, the future seems bright. Not really for Beeper (which I'll continue to use for non-critical, non-private chat apps), but because the EU is working towards forcing gatekeeping services like Messenger and iMessage to open up and allow third party clients. And that's a good thing.

Soon, we'll be able to return to the days of a single chat client for all your services. And it will be here for it.