BumbleBe - Chat like it's 1999

Do you also miss the instant messengers you grew up with? Back when the internet was a lot smaller, programs were more lightweight and good user experience was still a thing, a few instant messengers were on almost every computer and connected the world. With the hype of smartphones, usage of good old instant messengers on desktop computers declined, as they didn't have a mobile app back then and so they were discontinued some day.

BumbleBe is our take to bring that experience back. It's available exclusively for Haiku and it's free software released under the GNU GPL 3.0. The source code of BumbleBe dates back to the BeOS era, when it was used to access one of the big commercial instant messenger networks. BumbleBe keeps both the nostalgic feeling and the technical base, but does now connect to the Phoenix messenger network by default, with other OSCAR-compatible servers supported, too.

More technical information is available on the Codeberg page. We'd love to get feedback, be it ideas, feature requests, bug reports, ideas or offers to help. You can create Issues and Pull requests directly on Codeberg, or alternatively use our contact form.

Hello, Nostalgia...

BumbleBe looks and acts very similar to the old commercial instant messengers, allowing you to bring back childhood memories. It allows you to format your messages with different font families, sizes and soon colors, not just boring text. You can set a custom profile message and away messages. Currently, only 1:1 chats are available. Support for group chats, file transfers, audio and video calls is planned, but it's not clear yet when it will be ready, or if we'll manage to implement that at all.

Comparing the feature set of modern messengers with those BumbleBe tries to rebuild, you'll notice that the features don't differ that much. More than 20 years ago, there was already support for audio and video calls, but the connection was established directly between the clients, saving traffic on the server. File transfers were already possible, sent directly from one client to another to remove the server as possible speed bottleneck and avoiding the need for the server to store big files on disk for a long time.

What changed over the years is mostly the design and the technical architecture. Did you notice that almost every modern messenger looks the same? They have a single big window, a left sidebar with a list of contacts and groups, a right sidebar with room members, and a big main area where messages are shown in speech bubbles, wasting tons of screen space.

BumbleBe puts your buddy list and each chat in a separate window, allowing you to organize everything the way you want. Want to have a big browser window where you do your primary work, and your most important chats next to it, so you always see them? BumbleBe lets you do that. Modern alternatives don't.

Speaking about security

Let's be honest here: BumbleBe is not secure. Please don't use it for sharing confidential information. It has exactly the level of security that was common in the early 2000s: None at all. There is of course no end-to-end encryption, so the server can potentially log everything you write, and there's also no TLS transport encryption for the connection, so every random bad actor at the route from your computer to the server can also capture everything.

We have plans to implement at least TLS some day, as that would effectively limit the potential logging to the server operator, which shouldn't be a issue if you can trust the server you use. In fact, your email traffic is most likely only TLS encrypted, but not end-to-end encrypted, too, so it's not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, the TLS way of signing on to the OSCAR protocol hasn't been reverse-engineered yet, so availability of TLS in BumbleBe will take a while.

Even if it's not the Fort Knox of online communication, we hope you'll have fun talking with other Haiku users and making new contacts.