The only thing the beeper client itself brings over your garden variety matrix client is a coat of paint. It’ll make group chats between you, your friend and the bot that’s forwarding everything look like a private chat. Or the chat between a phone # and you will look like the contact name and you and are talking (and if that contact changes so will the chat).
Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients.
It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.
