It’s all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There’s no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it’s one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn’t some continued use for it.
(This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?
Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).
I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.
Curious if that’s you?
What’s wrong with Beeper?
This is really not accurate. Matrix is not designed to be a super privacy first protocol. It’s like Lemmy in the it’s designed to solve a problem and be a useful federated collaboration tool. It borrows features from a number of popular messaging platforms. Message history is stored on the server but encrypted client side so privacy is preserved. It supports group chat rooms. It supports voice and video. And most importantly, it supports bridges- you can connect your matrix to other services that are completely incompatible with matrix using a bridge. Perhaps the best example of this is Beeper, which is built on matrix. They are trying to replicate the user experience of the old app Trillian- beeper can link with a number of chat services including Google messages, slack, WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc. Thus you get all your chats in one place.
Not matrix? XMPP is a good idea, but the wildly different levels of support among clients cause problems even back in its heyday Matrix solves some of that, fully encrypted, chat history stored on the server in encrypted form, supports gateways to other services.
Exactly. This thing itself is saying most people live outside of reasonable range of an office. And it says nothing about any sort of accommodation for those people or ability to continue remote work. This is a ‘relocate or quit’ notice. For those who were hired as remote workers, I hope they are smart enough to just say no to both options, force the company to lay them off and pay unemployment and severance.
Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
Have these issues been fixed?