Trying to finish the Horizon Forbidden West story, but it’s a bit meh. Really sad about that! The HZD stories were great, and the world is as beautiful as ever, but I stopped caring at some point with the newest one. Other than that, I just bought the Age of Wonders 4 season pass and am trying out the new races and traits.

the connecting with a majority of people using the same closed source platform

The platform is open, including the part that connects to other closed source platforms. It’s just Matrix and open source bridges after all. And making the client app closed souce doesn’t help with any of that.

I’m sorry if I’m a bit pedantic about this, but it seems like you’re describing an upside to closed source software that’s just not there.

You’re definitely right that people are a bit too doom-and-gloom about it, Beeper did do a lot of good over the last few years!

But I also find it a bit odd that they talk so much about the importance of open source in messaging, and then release a closed source client without at least adressing the topic. Add the fact that they’ve been aquired by another company on the same day, and it starts to smell like another instance of openwashing.

Idk, we’ll have to see how it plays out I guess.

I can answer that: it’s the “I don’t care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people” experience.

Closed source doesn’t help with that though, you don’t have to care about privacy in open source.

except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway

They are working on on-device bridges that preserve e2ee, but making the client closed source kind of defeats the purpose here.

The thing is, we are talking about the Beeper service here. Yes Matrix is good, yes Beeper bridges are good, but a closed source Beeper app is bad. That’s what the criticism is about, and it doesn’t help if you deflect that by arguing about all the other things they are doing or that no one is forced to install it.

That’s not the point. An app doesn’t become good because you can just not use it.

What is this “closed source experience” you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, especially when their stated goal is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!

Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don’t really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I’m actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.

This is not applicable here, since Beeper is “just” Matrix + Bridges + Simplified UX!

Definitely! I think my real criticism here is that there’s no new survival mechanic to replace the challenge of supplying and storing enough water.

It’s reeeaaally good imo, but also a freaking time machine. You start to play it, and 1 hour later you traveled like 10 hours into the future.

To be a bit more serious, the game has a very nice and cozy vibe, an interesting construction system with buildings on top of other buildings and intricate road and energy transmission planning, great water mechanics, and a good economy and survival loop. You can spend hours trying to figure out an optimal way to stack and connect certain builds, and you have to be really careful about when to expand, cut back, or build more production and storage, because the next drought or bad water season could very well be your last!

One thing I really don’t like is that you kinda have to play it with the time sped up, because many things just take a ridiculously long time to build. It also gets much easier once you manage to get your water supply under control, almost nullifying the survival mechanics.

A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don’t think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.

It gets a bit more complicated than that when it comes to antitrust law.

They can ask users if they want that, I’m sure many of their users do. What they shouldn’t do is force people to accept their version of “security and privacy”.