In the latest episode of “they will always sell you out” - they sold you out! Who would’ve thought.
Hoping for a good alternative client to appear, the writing is on the wall. Vaultwarden can’t exist without “leeching” off of Bitwarden.
The year of keepass and syncthing!.
Sad. Replaced everything with keepassxc + syncthing
I am confused. Aren’t their clients open source? How many milliseconds will take till 100s folks will fork it?
Their server is useless and Vaultwarden is already a superior option
While I agree that they are a “at risk” company, I don’t think the software itself is at risk
All hail the new Chief Enshittification Officer!
i was just thinking this week with the passphrase addition how good bitwarden is and when will the other shoe drop. There it is.
Keepass (all variants and forks) has a passphrase generator, been built-in for years.
The writing is on the wall for BW, and has been for quite some time now.
I think the original title was more helpful because it shows that this is a recent development. Maybe you can add “new CEO”?
Bitwarden scrubs ‘Always free’ and ‘Inclusion’ values from its website as longtime execs step down
In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms.
CFO Stephen Morrison also left Bitwarden in April, replaced by former InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Both Crandell and Morrison joined the company in 2019. Kyle Spearrin, who started Bitwarden as a fun hobby project in 2015, remains the company’s CTO.
You’re right, changed
This is why corporate promises can never be trusted, because a new CEO can change those promises on a whim.
It’s part of why despite being interested in Beeper, I never signed up for it because I had questions about if those privacy promises they made would be kept if they sold to a bigger company… which they eventually did.
On the plus side Bitwarden already made an official open source self-hosted version, which can be forked and/or return to the community developed Vaultwarden roots.
Meanwhile KeepassXC keeps on chugging along.
FYI beeper is really just matrix with bridges. Once I realized that I set up my own and now I have the same functionalities as beeper, self hosted, with a choice of clients.
Oh I was well aware at the time, but I had a lot of friends who still struggled with trying to use Matrix/Element so at the time I was seeking a simpler solution for them.
How fucking stupid do you need to be to struggle with element do they struggle to use cups are they trying to do weird advanced features on an architecture I’ve never heard of with a compiler built themselves wtf
element was very buggy a few years ago. the new clients are just now starting to get feature parity, and in my experience calls are still quite unstable, requiring your server to have some specific additional setup (which most public registration instances don’t have), besides that not a lot of clients have implemented yet MatrixRTC calls. even the client list on matrix.org is only showing whether a client supports the former calling system.
so for the layman it’s definitely not production ready yet. and even for new tech literate users some of the things are still challenging to figure out.
Nothing has fully working phone calls anymore my phone doesn’t
Wow, usually people lose their shit and complain that Element is too complex and that me and the devs are being assholes asking them to use it… You know kind of like all the people here on the Fediverse who think we need to make it bigger and bring in everyone from everywhere and that the devs and users who defend them are awful for not focusing on user interface first and making it less confusing to choose a server…
Anyway, thanks for being on team reasonable, because I’m with you on this 100%, but I can’t change how little people want to learn anything sadly so I make compromises with people who cant or wont learn how to do things. It sucks, people really don’t seem to understand that security and convenience are a balance, and every time people argue for shit to be easier they’re actually arguing for everything to be less secure. You sacrifice security for convenience, every time, and the opposite happens because you can sacrifice convenience for increased security measures. Security has to be complex by nature to be effective, and the core of Matrix is being a secure, encrypted protocol, which they have already actually put a ton of work into making easier for fucking normies. Yet, it’s never enough for people. Always screams of “It’s too complex! I hate thinking!”
The buttons are in a different place oh god so much blood yes I resized the window what’s your point
lmao God I can feel the frustration rising in me just thinking about it. I know these are digital rather than physical objects… but do these people fail to have object permanence?
I feel like there’s a very real rejection of consciousness and self reflection I feel that as a strange person who doesn’t always accommodate defaults too its really depressing in a very real sense they’re rejecting personhood based on protest and and silicon valley propaganda of normalcy and frictionlessness
Not everyone is a tech nerd some of us just want our stuff to work stop asking us to be nerds too this is why everyone hates you fix it fix it fix it
With one difference. After merging with text.com they switched to a model with on-device bridges so that the decryption on their servers is no longer needed. Ofc it’s similar if the matrix instance and the bridges run on the own server.
Has Vaultwarden said anything yet? I imagine that, if necessary, given that bitwarden’s client is still open, at the point they choose to try and close it, we, the users, can fork it and establish it for vaultwarden, correct? Or, maybe even the vaultwarden team will think about forking it themselves and making a light client as well to pair with the current server.
But Vaultwarden can exist without “leeching” they just haven’t needed to yet. That’s more symbiotic than parasitic. The parasite class just took over Bitwarden after all.
Not to my knowledge. As far as forks go, that’s true. However, Vaultwarden would need to become an independent team, and even if they don’t take over maintaining the client, someone else would need to become independent. While it can work, it can also lead to very nasty, longstanding bugs or security issues due to scale, budget, and effort. I see this a lot with Apple apps for example - smaller developers understandably don’t want to deal with Apple’s crap and costs, and everyone suffers in the end.
If you look at the current state of the cybersecurity world, it’s not kind to open-source developers. AI-generated BS is dredging up vulnerabilities on all sides. So security is also a big concern. Someone like Bitwarden has a lot of budget to swing.
Vaultwarden itself is incredibly good, but not perfect:
~~https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-26012.~~
Edit: Bad example, point is security is a concern with a smaller team.
You’re right. And that’s why more of us need to contribute and spread the word of projects to support them.
Honestly, FOSS is our last bastion against this consumerist hellscape. I’m working on learning to build my own discord-like front end on matrix specifically for gaming. But I’m just one guy. We’ve all gotta pick where we place our effort and support those around us similarly.
Vaultwarden taking over bitwarden, should they shut doen as open source, I think would be entirely worthy. But it might need more people to either help vaultwarden or maintain it on their own, you’re right.
To me, seeing and learning about all of these projects gives me hope. All of these people and communities working to build things out of passion and dedication, because they care and want to provide value to others. No profit motive necessary. We just need to be there to support them as we’ve tied capital to our survival currently.
What is your matrix front end called?
It doesn’t exist yet 😅 as I said, still learning and trying to avoid using AI as a lot of vibe coded discord clones popped up. I did compile a list (which probably needs updating)
https://github.com/DukePantarei/discord-alternatives-wishlist
True dat. The more people know every corporation, even the most “wholesome chungus Reddit karma 100” ones ONLY care about squeezing profits out of you, the better off we’re going to be in the future.
Check out and contribute to gomuks. It’s the go-to power user Matrix client as I’ve learned. I recently developed a theme for it to make it look more like Cinny, which itself is a bit of a Discord UI Clone. I don’t actually use gomuks, but it really needed a nice theme.
Anyone that doesn’t understand that companies exist to make profit needs to be studied at this point. You have to wonder how they even function in the world.
People don’t go work 9-5 for the fun of it and for free, do they? No, a company and/or customers pay them. Without that payment step there’s no job and there’s no product/service.
If you don’t think the company deserves your money, find another free service and use that until they start charging. Rinse and repeat - or just be an adult and pay for services and work that you like and use.
Are you genuinely unable to comprehend the concept of a company not doing evil things to make profit? You do realise I paid for it up until this point right? Thanks captain obvious for telling me I can stop paying for things.
I was fine with a price hike, I realise that paid users are subsidizing free ones and everything is getting more expensive. What I’m not fine with is the deception, shitty marketing, removal of “DEI-like” language, and a sudden clear lack of morality in the company. They lost my trust, anyone with a brain shouldn’t trust them either with their most precious online secrets.
And you call yourself a freedom advocate, then advocate for textbook enshittification which always leads to the removal of freedom lol, what a shill
You think that people are going to lose “freedom” with Bitwarden making changes? Are you serious?
They’re not doing anything “evil” lol. Inclusivity should not be a main focus of a password storage company lol. That makes no sense.
You shouldn’t have had “trust” in a company to begin with. That’s on you.
I fucking knew this would happen years ago. Something always smelled “off” about BW.
namely the VC funding and the huge resource hungry clients to me
you saw that something on the internet will go to shit in a couple of years? speak to us, oracle! :)
Right? Lmao who would’ve thought??
They responded on reddit and walked some of it back as an “oversight”: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/1tdvnh7/comment/olznwcv/. Allegedly, I’m too lazy to verify.
A change that would require intent to make is not a mistake or oversight.
This sucks. I committed to Bitwarden years ago and now am going to have to switch before they lock me in the garden.
They also haven’t addressed the removal of inclusion and transparency from their goals.
EDIT: They did. They said it’s “less of a priority”. The article I shared has been updated. I smell corporate bullshit though. “Oversight” this, “priority shift” that, they’d have to work hard to gain any trust back.
Move to KeePassXC or its recent LLM-free fork while you still can, because at some point Bitwarden is going to try to go closed-source again.
Oh crap, how’s KeePass got an LLM involved‽ Time to look into this now…
I did find https://codeberg.org/ChiPass/ChiPass , but it looks like a very new project.
Yeah, I’m no fan of slopcoding either, but this policy addresses those who contribute AI-generated code; it is most certainly not “our devs are shipping AI slopcode”.
Seems a lot here missed this part:
All code submissions go through a rigorous review process regardless of the development workflow or submitter.
Linus Torvalds does the same thing with the Linux kernel. He gets AI-generated slopcode submissions all the time. They’re reviewed by real people, and like most submissions Linus gets, sloppy work is rejected, AI and human alike.
but it’s so much easier to grab torches and pitchforks than to read an announcement
…actually seems quite reasonable.
very much so.
For once ADHD preventing me from completing a migration is a boon, I guess I’ll move back to keepass
Well fuck this
Once again, enshittification by the fucking suits.
Early on I decided to use only KeePass for full personal control instead of an online service. Didn’t regret making that decision.
