Beeper's server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can "self host Beeper" that's really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here's a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.
stu
joined 1 year ago
Afaik, that isn't in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.
Somebody read Little House on the Prairie once and said, "I can do that!" I'm joking, but only slightly.
What do you mean by nefarious exactly? I don't get the impression that it's evil...
As long as they don't try to mandate that tech companies provide encryption backdoors, have at it.
I don't think I've used a coin flip to decide anything in my life since my parents occasionally used one to decide something between my brother and I as kids (such as who would get first turn on something). Every time I thought to do a coin flip for decision making as a younger person, I'd find myself leaning toward and secretly hoping for one outcome and think to myself...this is dumb, let's just do the one I'm already leaning toward. Now it's not even something I consider doing when making decisions. I also go literally months, sometimes years, between touching coins now, so I'd have to ask Google to flip a coin for me or something.
Wu-Tang is for the children, after all...
It's actually pretty sad that there are probably going to be some braindead Hollywood execs who completely missed the point of the movie and unironically pitch something like this.
Yeah, serial killers have to be disarming enough to pursue victims while not giving off too many social signals that they're responsible for killing multiple people.
I probably could've worded that statement better and you bring up good points when it comes to individuals. Innovation clearly does not require profit motive to occur. The type of innovation you're talking about does require time to achieve, however. For individuals, this is leisure time, for organizations this is billable time. Regardless of the structure of an economy, the creative pursuits you've described can't occur if people are being worked to death.
One thing I will say about open source software, though, is that a lot of projects don't exist because of pure altruism. A lot of projects have been corporate funded (sometimes significantly funded) in order to specifically kill closed source competitors. I'm a pragmatist, though, I see open source software as a universal good for humanity regardless of its raison d'etre. Open source software is a form of competition that pushes closed source software vendors to innovate in order to justify their value. I could also argue that a lot of free content on the Internet is only free in the sense that it was produced by people who didn't have a profit motive and it's still often subscription or ad supported. YouTube, for example, still makes a lot of money on it.
The main point I was driving at is the choice of economic system doesn't matter much for personal creative endeavors as long as it allows people time to pursue them. But market competition for profits is absolutely one of the most powerful motivators for product and service innovation for corporations. So if you adopt an economic system that essentially eliminates competition and profits, you kill that motivation to innovate.
It's almost not even fair to say they're merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.
It's also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it's been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.