Chewy7324

Beeper's software stack is partly open source. They develop the mautrix bridges for WhatsApp, Signal, Discord and many more as open source.

What they keep closed source is their clients (and probably infrastructure).

The documentation to host their bridges is great [1] and the bridges works with most server implementaions (I know of Synapse, Dendrite & Conduit).

I'm running signal and whatsapp bridges for years now without problems, but it's definitely simpler to pay for Beeper.

The problem with these bridges is that they have to decrypt messages and encrypt them again with matrix. This means anyone who controls the server running bridges has access to your messages. Self-hosting means I'm still in control of my data.

[1] https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/index.html

Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn't impact Conduit as much is that there're other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

The CLA is necessary since Element funds the development of their servers by contracting with companies, governments and institutions which have special needs. Publishing those patches might be against their customers wishes.

The AGPL ensures no one else can make proprietary changes but Element because of their CLA. This makes it unattractive for companies and volunteers to contribute to Element's servers, which isn't a problem because those contributors didn't exist in the first place.

As I understand it, the people who feel strongly about this change feel like their trust was betrayed by Element. The others are probably corporation's like reddit who don't want to contribute anyway but are now not able to profit off of Elements work.

My opinion is split. On the one hand I like the change to AGPL, since it forces forks to continue to be foss. On the other hand, Element continues to be allowed to license the code differently, so it doesn't really change that the code could be closed off at any point in time.

The most important question is whether this change will benefit Element. Status quo is companies taking without giving back. Now corporations and volunteers won't contribute code because of the CLA and AGPL. This means Element hopes those corporations will contract with Element to get access to differently licensed code for a monetary contribution.

I think reddit will just develop their own server, but maybe smaller companies (like in the health care sector) will pay Element.

This is awesome. I've been looking into DNS servers with ad blocking and this seems to be a perfect fit. And it is packaged for Nix, so I'll definitely give it a go.

I've also been using hetzner storage boxes. They are as cheap as it gets and my internet connection is the limiting factor anyway.

I've heard a few times that people managed to dodge the letter, but I've also heard of multiple people who had to pay.

If more people would torrent over i2p with great internet connections the experience would get better, since all i2p users are part of the network of servers. The slowest connection in the multiple hops decides the connection speed.

Because all traffic is encrypted and doesn't leave the i2p network, forwarding traffic from unknown systems is not an issue, similar to Tor middle nodes (Tor Exit nodes shouldn't be hosted at home).

It's really easy for a law firm in Germany to find out who the IP belonged to, if they have proof that the IP infringed on their copyrighted media.

The law firm looks at torrents and downloads a bit. With the IP, time and media name they can send a cease and desist letter with a fine of hundreds to thousands of euro. Ignoring the letters is not possible.

This is possible because the law firm has contracts with many big copyright holders (Disney, ...).

But most of the time the fine is too high, so it's possible to pay half by getting a lawyer. Basically the copyright holder overestimate how much damages they can get for the distribution of copyrighted material. If I understand it correctly. IANAL.

It's simple to avoid by binding the torrent client to the network interface of a VPN, but not everyone knows that.

Even then I wouldn’t do it. Installing games takes a while too, so it’s not much of a time-saver compared to automatically organizing movies/shows.

And the risk of getting a misleadingly named game with malware is too high. Remembering to sandbox isn’t easy either, after possessing them for a while. Untrusted files should never be on a computer, imo. But I don’t pirate games, so take my advice for what it is.

Thanks for the long reply. Sadly I don't know enough about unix sockets and docker/podman networking to help you.

I've only used unix sockets with postgresql and signald. For both I had to mount the socket into the container and for the postgres I had to change the config to use unix sockets.

It's an annoying change for anyone using discord to share files outside of it's closed platform but doesn't affect most people.

I wonder whether bridges for matrix have to be fixed or if they're already editing messages bridged to matrix to the new url.

I know there're tools to record songs on Spotify that automatically splits and tags them. It just isn't as good as downloading directly from Deezer etc.

Yeah, DRM annoys paying customers but doesn't stop copies to appear online.