Episode: 3988
Title: HPR3988: Beeper.com
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3988/hpr3988.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:20:40

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3988 for Wednesday, the 15th of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled Be Parker.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Operator Talks about beeper.com a multi-chat client.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio, we are your host, Operator.
Apologies for the sound I am getting in the car for the next 3 hours or so.
So I am going to use this time to do an episode or two and this one is going to be about
beeper.com or multi-chat client protocols in my experience with it so far.
I asked, we probably months or two ago, somebody else in a discord scene, what are my options?
You know, we got all these chat things and I am to go to track all this stuff.
At one point in time I wanted to create a script that would scrape URLs from discord and
mastodon, all the chats and all my stuff and everything.
And it's great to do like a daily digest and remove duplicates of where they were or what
channels you set what in what channels and what clients never got around to it and actually
it's a pretty good idea because chances are something you think worth reading or anything
worth knowing about is probably going to be like a web link or a URL, right?
There might be some screenshots that might give you some indication but it's always
hollowed up with a URL, right?
Something worth looking at a reading from police and technology perspective usually has
a URL behind it outside of just Twitter or whatever your communication, social media
thing of choices.
So anyways, absent of completing that script which I feel like I might have to actually
do, I know I did discord and one other one, I had two of those already set up but anyways,
what I wanted was a mobile application and if someone can tell me something else that
I could be using besides deeper, it's relatively easy to set up or relatively cheap or I'll
pay whatever at this point.
I want, these are kind of my requirements, are slack, discord, aren't the two good ones.
I would like to have mastodon like following up a channel or following up my own threads
or whatever and I think that's pretty much it.
I want matter most, I want discord, I want slack, they're not matter most but mastodon,
slack and discord.
What beeper has is also support signal and they're like in a trial phase right now, start
up phase or whatever so you register and then like a month or so they'll send you an email
activation so you have, what beeper, it's like a lot of the old, excuse me, I added signal,
discord, signal, discord, linkedin and slack and you can pick which channels and slack
you want to have in added, right?
You can pick which ones you want to have like what channels so you don't have to worry
about like you know if you're going to get spanned by all your discord channels you can
pick which ones you want to be in your heap and I also want it to be mobile too so I don't
necessarily, not necessarily mobile but able to access it with a small device if I have
to use like a terminal that would also be fine but I would rather prefer something with
a nice UI.
So if you know any suggestions, excuse me those, those poor things.
Let me know, but beeper is kind of like a matrix bridge, a posted matrix bridge that will
do all those for you so I think you can set it up yourself if you want and it's essentially
like a matrix bridge or a matrix server with a bunch of bridges installed on it.
To my knowledge, there's not a mastodon bridge which I don't know why that doesn't exist.
Maybe I don't really understand what I'm supposed to be doing.
Maybe I'm supposed to use another party and connect that to there but there's from what
I can understand there's no matrix mastodon bridge but that's one piece that I am missing.
Beeper does support matrix so in theory you could set up your own matrix server whatever
you want to do and essentially write your own plug-ins, connectors or whatever.
So I've been using beeper for about a month and a half now or so.
The desktop is the weird, it's everything centers around the desktop client that hits
him.
RoboTrux.
Everything centers around the desktop client and authentication is odd, there's no password
on your account as far as I know.
There's a recovery token you can get if you can't log in but it's like an installed
desktop application when you put it on your mobile, you register, once you register you
get an invite, once you get the invite it tells you to install a desktop client.
Once you get the desktop client you use that to authenticate with the mobile client and
it generates a part code to scan and at no time do you actually set a password as far
as I remember, at least they did give you a recovery code which is essentially maybe
a one time key for your password, it's like 24 characters or something ridiculous.
So the sign of process is a little wonky if you're not into it and I know a lot of services
are doing this now where they're just straight up forgetting, they're not even doing
passwords anyway.
I know for one of my healthcare things, you can't even log in with any two FAA or anything,
they just send you an email which is not great because most of that stuff I attached
to my Yahoo because I don't want my Gmail ending up anywhere so I will only put my Gmail
in a box when it's absolutely critical that I get notifications from that as soon as
possible or actual people.
And then I don't trust people to give it to people.
So I'll even say hey, this is my, here's my Gmail, please don't put this email in any
box.
This is only for you personally don't send me any e-cards or e-vites or any of that crap
to this email if you want to send me that then send it to my Yahoo.
So it's weird authentication and the way it sets up, sets it up you can essentially pick
what channels you want to have pop up and as far as notifications go, I think the notifications
for Discord are managed still in Discord.
So if you like set up your channels the way you want and notifications you want in Discord
and then you just turn that server on you'll get the notifications you want.
But there's also a feature called like low priority which if you're getting a bunch
spam from one channel and you'll want to necessarily manage the notifications in Discord
you can put it to low priority so that way you can still see them but they're not going
to pop up and your inbox or whatever.
What I did notice recently and I don't know if it's doing it right now we check.
I want to say my inbox used to have channels in it and I swear maybe I'm crazy but it's
inbox based, it's more message based, the idea is it's more wrapped around messaging.
So the priority there is messaging not chat, it's client but it is a chat client because
it supports this flag in Discord.
But so for whatever reason I swear I didn't have to do this maybe it was on the desktop
and I can't even tell the difference because the integration is so beautiful between
the two I can't tell the difference but I have to manually click my Discord channels to
see what messages I've missed so I'll have a little flag there but I have to put the
hamburger being used to see which messages I missed so I don't know if that's a bug
or a feature or maybe I haven't noticed that because I used the desktop line online.
But if somebody messages you directly on Discord obviously or in the chat on Discord
they'll see it there.
So I like it, little thingy's making sure he's stopped.
So I like it so far so good, I don't feel like Macedon is going to be an option.
They do have matrix support so if I could find some kind of other bridge to bridge Macedon
to matrix then I can add Macedon to Bieber and I will be happy.
But there's obviously it's not a feature rich across the board so you kind of have to
log in to LinkedIn every once in a while and you have to log in to Twitter or X every
once in a while to check their messages or whatever.
I don't even know if I have Twitter attached to it but um so yeah I like it, it keeps
those from keeping eye on things, I can be a lot more involved in channels that I want
to be involved with and I can keep an eye on things a lot better but apparently you
know you can set up your own and it's not necessarily easy but maybe I'll get to that
point.
But that's pretty much where it's at.
I don't know if you remember way back, you had trillium services where you could like
as a multi-check client protocol so it was like AOL, AOL is the messenger, IRC, ICQ
and it's supported like maybe one or two other ones, got a messenger and you can have
a single chat app for everything and somewhere along the way we lost that need because
you know now you got signals, signals and telegrams and all that and everybody's got
a chat and a preference, I know a wee chat was one that we used in Ireland with our
group and I don't, the whole secure messaging thing is a farce and you actually feel like
you actually stick out like a sort of thumb when you're using these encrypted protocols.
Like if you're going to do shady stuff, don't do it on like telegrams, right or right.
Anywhere that's like supposed to be used for that stuff because you're just going to
end up like stick out like a sort of thumb, right?
You want to mix in with the crowd, that's probably your best bet is to use some kind of
weird codes or you know whatever.
So anyways, that's pretty much it I have for you.
For them, as far as other options, I don't know of any, I was listening to a podcast
and I heard them talking briefly about some other options but they were you know unfiterated
things that you know they're trying to get people to use but I need something that's
going to support all the real stuff that people use but so none of these third party kind
of other protocol based ones are going to work.
That's pretty much it.
Again, if you know anything that will support Slack, Masadon, whatever it is, Slack, Masadon,
GitHub, that would be great because those are the ones that I would like to track or better
and easily.
Anyways, I hope that helps out and talk to you later.
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