this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
450 points (93.6% liked)
Technology
66975 readers
3746 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I've even owned - smart or otherwise.
That said, I don't think I'm going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren't around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn't had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I'm not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I'll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash
He also screwed a lot of the employees on the way out from Pebble, and he also bailed on Beeper the minute it got complicated. Sold it to Matt Mullenweg a year or two after getting pimp-slapped by Apple because he had no real plan for what to do if Apple started banning the devices he was using as Matrix bridges. He gave up after like three days, it was honestly genuinely pathetic. This was a paid service and he fucked it all up for anyone using iMessage on it.
I have personal experiences with Beeper that make me less than trust Eric Migicovsky, and I really don't think he seems like a "nice guy." He actively sucks, doesn't have plans for sustainability and then sells it all off to someone else at a personal profit while the people doing the actual work get fucked out of a job.
What's the gist of your "personal experiences with Beeper"?
I was very excited when Beeper was first announced and I got on the wait list.
I finally got onboarded, and this was when you still had be walked through the setup by one of the Beeper employees.
I got into the Zoom meeting, and got a warning that it was going to be recorded. I had not, up to that point, had ever been disclosed that it was going to be recorded. I declined to join the meeting and sent a follow-up email with some pertinent privacy related questions, especially since in the case of some of the Bridges that were being used for this service essentially meant Beeper would have access to my credentials. They would later create a more secure system, but it was not very secure early on.
My main question regarded Micigovsky's past in selling Pebble and I asked what gaurantees of the privacy policy were being made in regard to a potential sale of the company (considering it eventually got sold, I guess a good question to ask), and what, if any, promises were being made for the privacy policy to stay unchanged through a sale.
I never got a response to my questions. Not being told I was going to be recorded, and not ever getting an answer to reasonable privacy policy questions led me to never signing up for the service.