![]() ![]() "When Slack goes down for six hours," Hodgson said, "or Signal goes down for 24 hours, people realize, 'hang on, all my eggs are in one basket.'" There are already decentralized, harder-to-kill apps like Slack or Signal running on Matrix, where there's less security risk or possibility of downtime. It's all end-to-end encrypted, and it's resilient by virtue of not being housed in a single data center. Matrix-based messaging can support a whole ecosystem of apps, the way email protocols do. Not to mention, it's kind of a killer app. "Matrix just gives you the building blocks to synchronize it between different deployments." Messaging just happens to be something with which Hodgson and his team have plenty of experience. "It's a real-time database for any kind of information," he said, from financial tickers to drone flights to VR streams. Ultimately, Hodgson said, Matrix is more than a messaging protocol. They wanted to build it and give it to the internet. "If you were going to build the holy grail of messaging," the team asked themselves several years ago - a service where anyone can participate, where everything is encrypted, where nothing is locked off from the ecosystem - "what would it look like?" Some of this tech has been built in the past, but always inside a single company or service. "Matrix is our effort to right the balance" after decades of great tech being turned into walled gardens, said Matthew Hodgson, Matrix's technical co-founder. In the last few years, though, a group of developers has been building a new protocol, one they hope can offer all the openness and decentralization of XMPP but with all the modern features people need now: encryption, voice and video, integrations with other apps and the like. Whatever the reason, messaging apps soon became walled gardens, with everything run - and stored - in one place. "Today, group conversations, sharing your day with stickers or emojis and messaging across multiple devices have become second nature to many of us," Google product manager Mayur Kamat wrote in 2015 announcing the switch from Google Talk (which supported XMPP) to Hangouts (which didn't). Some argued XMPP was too complicated a protocol and simply didn't work others said they could develop features more quickly by keeping everything in-house. For a while, it worked: From AIM to Google Talk to the early days of Facebook Chat, some of the biggest messaging services used XMPP.Ī few years later, Google and Facebook - and soon others - decided to stop supporting XMPP. When it was designed, XMPP intended to make all kinds of communication on the internet, from text to video to file transfers, into decentralized systems. In the early days of online messaging (otherwise known as The Adium Era), many messaging services were based on a protocol called Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP. To explain how Beeper works, and why Migicovsky thinks it's valuable, you have to understand the protocols. It was like going back to the Stone Ages." "And for the hours I was fixing it, I had to open up Slack, Telegram, Signal, everything. "Beeper went down for me a couple of weeks ago, and I had to fix it," he said. Migicovsky said roughly 40 people have been using the app for the last few months, and that he's come to rely on it completely. The app launched this week, and will cost $10 a month for anyone who wants to use it. It's called Beeper, and it pulls 15 different messaging services - including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and iMessage - into a single app. Migicovsky has spent the last two years building a modern equivalent. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. ![]() Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. And the former CEO of Pebble - he's now a partner at Y Combinator - knows a thing or two about messaging. ![]()
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