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Microsoft Is Shutting Down Skype, Shifting Users to Teams

Hey, remember Skype? I do. When I joined my first tech company (making silly little Facebook games back when that was a thing), they were coordinating over emails and in-person desk visits. First thing I did as an unpaid intern was move the dev team onto Skype.

We used it for so long we have some Skype emoji on this forum too :voodoo: :wave2: :mooning:

So long Skype, and thanks for all the fish.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-is-shutting-down-skype-shifting-users-to-teams

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4 comments
  • @julian I think the writing was on the wall in the last year after Microsoft couldn’t support real Skype releases. That and the deluge of crypto spam chat invites really made using it awful.

    I did some initial research into the state of voice chat programs that I could use on linux that didn’t involve electron. I much prefer a native application that I can build from source. Unfortunately there aren’t many options… 

    • Jitsi offers a desktop client, but it hasn’t had a release since 2017 so effectively abandoned, and the project seems all-in on electron.
    • Jami is peer-to-peer (P2P) and distributed hash table (DHT) network.
    • Tox is distributed hash table (DHT), but seems tied to crypto, and qtox is unmaintained and archived.
    • Nextcloud Talk has a desktop client, but it does not support Talk. The Talk desktop client is electron-based.

    Of the four, Jami seemed the most promising, but I couldn’t get a working build compiled.