Skype, the online video-calling service, is shutting down in May after more than two decades of service. For those of a certain generation, Skype changed everything.
Before it launched in 2003, making international calls 📱 was prohibitively expensive and few viable digital alternatives existed. Skype offered users a cheap and easy way to call anyone in the world, skirting the draconian landline industry. When Skype added video calls a few years later, it felt as if the future had arrived: Students used Skype to stay connected to families back home 🤙, international friendships were born 🤝, and a generation of cross-border relationships began ❤️ — or ended 💔 — over the service. By the late 2000s, Skype was so ubiquitous that its name became a verb, much like Xerox and Google. Its bouncy ringtones and audio notifications were iconic. 🎶
At its peak, Skype had about 300 million users around the world. But it was a product of the desktop era, and as users went mobile, Skype lost its edge to upstarts like WhatsApp and FaceTime. Today, the app is forgotten on most phones and computers, particularly in the West. ⏰
The platform still has dedicated pockets of users in countries like Turkey, Russia, India, and the Philippines, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing its imminent shutdown. 😴
Before Skype goes the way of other early internet icons like AOL Instant Messenger and Friendster, Rest of World readers shared their favorite memories of the service. Here are their stories. 🙇
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
82 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
38581 readers
636 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sad that it is being replaced by the much worse Teams and there isn't much to replace it in the open source world except for Signal, Threema, Wire and maybe Jitsi meet.
None of those (except Jitsi to a small extent) qualify as replacements if we ever want to evolve out of the silos we let megalomaniac CEOs build to better control us. So I'll add to the list: prose.org , movim.eu (or anything based on XMPP) and matrix.org (though this one is rapidly falling into obsolescence). The keyword here is federation.
For an average user how good is calling on XMPP and Matrix on any given server? We've only seen matrix.org have successful calling and we've never had success with XMPP calling nor joining groups on it. No idea what prose is.
In terms of tech and implementation details, it's been years since everyone has been converging towards the same WebRTC architecture (with everyone bundling/linking the same set of basic components and libs as found in chrome, android, ...). As such, a call between two participants (or as a group with less than a dozen participants) should be as good on XMPP as anywhere else (including the commercial options like Google Meet, Zoom, Matrix, ...).
spoiler
Of course there are caveats like relying on TURN where direct connection is impossible, but that's the gist of it. Regarding XMPP group calls,Where things start getting spicier is in large group calls (dozens of participants or more) requiring the stream to be brokered by a central server (SFU), with stream re-compression and optimisation. Standard-XMPP isn't great for that yet (non-standard XMPP, like Jitsi, on which it is based, is pretty damn good, but unavailable from your regular XMPP setup). Work is going on to improve that (on two fronts, with some XMPP servers turning into SFUs, and with a protocol being designed for offloading AV streams to any willing existing SFU).
spoiler
The problem with large group calls essentially boils down to how much bandwidth and CPU you want to throw at it, and that's not cheap (unless, of course, you are the product, i.e. Google Meet, Discord & al). The same applies to self-hosted Matrix/Galene/Jitsi: you probably won't want to hold a large conference call on a home-server, and the server admins are bearing some costs, so get to know them and how sustainable that is. In the case of Matrix.org, it is not.Prose is an open-source XMPP client with a focus on large rooms/banquet-style conversations (like IRC, slack, …). It is still in its early stages but already quite usable and possibly a good fit for a subset of Skype refugees.