It would be nice if I could get SMS 2FA-type notifcations on my desktop without having to use my phone.
I probably wouldn’t use Signal with it, since Beeper’s own page seems to suggest that sending Signal messages with it would be less secure! And, I guess, SMS isn’t secure to begin with . . .
If I download and install Element, and then look at the SMS bridges available on Matrix’s website, the recommended bridge instructions sends me over to Beeper, since I don’t have my own server. Old and confused here . . .
Beeper has questionable ownership now, and honestly, I always found their privacy practices questionable at best.
When I was being onboarded for Beeper, when it was still in it’s infancy and they had to walk you through the technical setup via an onboarding video call, I asked what promises they could keep about privacy if the company was sold? I asked because the owner of Beeper was the guy who made the Pebble watch and he sold Pebble and I was wondering if the sale would require the privacy policy to stay the same. I never got a response, and then Migicovsky sold it, like I thought he might.
What actually made me ask the question initially was getting into a recorded onboarding session that I had never been warned would be recorded. The first warning I had that they would record the video-call onboarding session was when I logged into the session. They never thought to warn me ahead of time that my voice and onboarding would be recorded. I bowed out and never signed up for Beeper, especially since they never thought it was worth it to answer my questions about privacy practices after having already disrespected my privacy once. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth about their privacy promises if they couldn’t even bother to warn me ahead of time that an onboarding session would be recorded.
If you were running your own Matrix server and bridge, you at least know what’s happening because you’re fully in control of it. But that can be a lot of work where these options are out of the box working at least.
Erg, after all this fuss, Element is kind of hard to use and not very intuitive 🙁
Yeah as much as the other options aren’t perfect, it’s why I went with KDE connect. 😔
I am in the process of setting up my own Matrix server but it’s my first time using Ansible so who knows how that will go. Ugh.
Yeesh, doesn’t sound too good on their part. An interesting story, thanks for taking the time to write all that. I will now go ahead and cross Beeper off my list.
Wise concern. I never tried Beeper, either, despite becoming eligible from the waitlist.