I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
sure, but an open source UI isn’t going to change that… they’d just close the source!
sure you can fork it, but you can also just copy the UI to an open source clone
imagine if twitter were activitypub: kinda like having an OSS backend with a proprietary front end… i’d bet the move to mastodon would be far quicker… network effects keep people on twitter… same here with OSS backend: we can reimplement the UI and people will have the same experience
Based on the history of how Google Chat used XMPP to federate and basically siphon users into its closed UI, then defederate… I no longer trust anyone with a closed UI that’s planning to offer “extra value” to its users.
If someone closed their open UI, you can always fork the last open version, which at least gives you an even start.
If
Twitter𝕏 were to switch to ActivityPub… I’d actually worry about people flocking back to 𝕏, back to their old networks and recommendation algorithms. Guess it’s no longer possible, since 𝕏 pretty much destroyed the old Twitter environment, but I’d still worry… and with Elon wanting to make 𝕏 a “social network for everything”, that sounds dangerously close to ActivityPub.you’re missing the fact that google chat and XMPP is a totally different situation… they used an open protocol; they didn’t open their backend