Do you plan on continuing contributing to open source, or is Automattic going to dictate your business plan and Beeper will be enshittified?
“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
Beeper acquired by Automattic
171–180 of 310 posts
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#172The Verge reports: > Since then, Beeper has rolled out some security upgrades that change the way the app handles security and prevent Beeper itself from seeing unencrypted messages from Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted apps. Screenshots of Beeper’s desktop and mobile apps. How?
They break the terms of service of said services, they started this with iMessages last year and Apple shut them down after it was an obvious break of ToS, and they keep doing the same with other IM services.
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#173I trust Automattic implicitly. This seems like a good move.
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
>incredible journey'd away I'm calling Webster's right now.
Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
That link is probably more apropos than you intend, since Automattic also now owns Tumblr and has been a decent steward of it thus far, not shutting it down even though it undoubtedly loses lots of money. Instead, they made a good-faith effort to make it profitable, before putting it in minimal-cost maintenance mode when that didn't work out.
If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#175Do you plan on continuing contributing to open source, or is Automattic going to dictate your business plan and Beeper will be enshittified?
“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
That's a pessimistic take to say that Automattic will close up Beeper and make it a worse a product.
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#176Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#177Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!
Many companies don't know when to stop and end up killing their products by introducing bloat which almost no one wants and costs money to develop/maintain. Simplenote works, is maintained, and does what it says on the name... more should be like them.
If all they do is keep Beeper running reliably and add new services as needed, then I'd say that's a good thing for most users.
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
That's a pessimistic take to say that Automattic will close up Beeper and make it a worse a product.
I think it's more of a criticism of asking the question as if that was ever going to be given as an answer, regardless of what the actual answer is.
in what scenario do you see anyone giving the negative answer truthfully?
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#179Kinda sad. Beeper owns a ton of Matrix bridges. I wonder what will happen now.
Matt/Automattic is good at keeping things open source. On top of the work on WordPress and their plug-ins, when they acquired PocketCasts, they made the apps open source: https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-...
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#180Automattic basically consolidated the messaging aggregator market for $175M - I don't have any data but given they had 40 FTE between the two companies, I would guess not more than $10M in revenue across the two. Anyone understand the business rationale for wanting to own this market?
No matter what, as long as we continue to communicate with each other, messaging will never die. Individual messaging platforms will come and go but the idea of instant messaging has existed for about as long as the internet. $175M might be a steal if Beeper gets more mass market appeal.