That's an acquisition price of $1,086/user, note that isn't active user!
Amazing price Eric and the team got for an app that doesn't even mention AI!
Beeper acquired by Automattic
251–260 of 310 posts
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.
I haven’t used pidgin in years but does that Teams plugin really work? I’ve seen projects try to integrate it into matrix and drop off because it was too hard.
Works for me!
Although I'm the plugin's developer, so I may be a little biased :D
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep it's a great place to be especially when the CEO from a company punches down on a volunteer project on the day that CEO sold their company for 125 Million USD... /s
Haha sorry I meant lucky as in not having to use Teams.
Yeah I know, I was just using the opportunity to vent some frustration :)
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#254Kind of surprising, 1- because Automatic is known for wordpress, what's the play with messaging? 2- They apparently acquired texts.com as well so clearly an area they are interested in. I also would prefer not to see consolidation but also I imagine it's hard to make money on this kind of product so maybe that drove the decision to merge?
Automattic owns a few properties other than Wordpress now. They also own Pocketcasts (podcast client), Tumblr, and Day One (journalling software).
Oh TIL that Day One is also Automattic
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#255Isn't this the joke from The Office with WOOPH or whatever it was... and an old program called Pidgin?
Nothing innovative here that's crazy
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#256Isn't this the joke from The Office with WOOPH or whatever it was... and an old program called Pidgin? Nothing innovative here that's crazy
Haha I was thinking about that, but the joke is actually the reverse of this. When someone sends you a WUPHF, you receive it on every medium. Phone, email, fax, text. Beeper does the opposite, anytime you receive something on one of these platforms, it consolidates it to the Beeper app
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).
I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding. My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
Static HTML is even cheaper. I don't understand how some people can't think outside of CMS land
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats on the new position and future of Beeper. I think Automattic will be a great home and I've been impressed with what they've done with other projects as well. Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper? Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...
> Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper? Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.
IIRC matrix and its foundation? were hurting for funding a while back and might yet still be. Did Beeper contribute to it or does Automattic plan to?
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not my experience. I’ve tried (and am still trying) texts and not once I was able to have it just work. Constantly messages not showing up, accounts not loading, or something else missing. I’ve been submitting heaps of feedback to the Texts team. It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.
I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup.
Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.
(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)
I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/
Re: Beeper acquired by Automattic
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't, they genuinely believe in Beeper, and the long term plan was rather to become the leading chat app in their own right, with users communicating over the Beeper protocol.
A bit of pedanticism here - it's not the Beeper protocol, it's the Matrix protocol. Beeper is built on top of Matrix (using bridges that you could host on your own server if you wanted).
What i meant was that the idea was that people would eventually stop using e.g. whatsapp on Beeper and just use Beeper, since eventually all their friends would also have the beeper app installed. Might sound a bit optimistic but there it is.