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I totally forgot it exists, meaning I thought it was already dead.
I still use it to make international calls to family (it’s my only use case for it). Does anyone know of a good replacement (preferably FOSS) that allows calling on landlines (yup, old people still use them)?
You can do this using JMP Chat, which bridges phone numbers to XMPP. Unfortunately, it’s USA and Canada only, for now.
Alternatively, you can use a “SIP Trunk Provider”. For instance, in the UK, Andrews and Arnold offers this service. You can then connect any compatible SIP client (e.g. Gnome Calls).
In the same boat. Not even just old people; I need to call 800 numbers but it would cost me a ton from Japan. Guess I’m doing that Monday night.
I don’t think Skype numbers are supported as well anymore, but many people rely on services for their US banks and stuff for 2fa as well.
Not FOSS but you can check Google Voice and see if the pricing for the country you need to call is convenient
It seems like a very underrated feature but Skype’s overseas calling feature was great and the 60 mins I get each month with 365 was really nice. Them getting rid of that basically made Skype useless.
I have a load of credit on there still (got tricked by them deactivating my credit and topped up unnecessarily). I still use it for international calls at least once a month, I hope this news story is overblown.
Do your credits still exist? I was under the impression that they phased out the credit system.
I forgot Skype still exists. They killed it a long time ago, now they will just make it official
Reportedly? It’s been dead since (in case of Linux) version
84.3 (just to hint at its age, it’s in Qt 4 and supports ALSA) stopped logging in.Exchanging files via Skype was very easy. Roleplaying in groupchats.
They are not killing Skype, they just now bury the corpse. Skype died by malnutrion and bad parenting by MS a decade ago.
Well, they’re doing what they already have been and absorbing it into teams. Teams video chat is littered with the bits of leftover Skype tech references, they’re just making sure it’s an enterprise product they can bill monthly for instead of a free consumer product
I find 365 to be a terrible mess if applications, outlook and teams have a calendar separate to the calendar app. Teams sucks
Thank goodness! My parents refuse to move the group chat to anything else.
Forgot it was even still around.
They killed it as soon as they acquired it.
The bigger headline is “Skype hasn’t been dead this whole time”
One of my clients is a small company that has been running with seven staff working from home, scattered around the globe, mostly rural. Since 1999. Everything has been held together by skype: chat, video, audio.
Should be interesting finding the right new workflow!
It’s amazing how they fumbled this. There was a time when video calls were Skype. Everybody was using Skype, everybody had it installed, people used it to chat and then … something happened. Microsoft did nothing. Or did the wrong kind of stuff. Software started to suck. And when the pandemic came, Zoom took over and nobody even tried to use Skype. That really, really are some bad business decisions there
That’s Microsoft for you
It didn’t “start to suck”, they intentionally transitioned it, from old lean clients working over p2p usable in unbelievably bad connectivity conditions, to something server-based and fat laggy clients with typical Microsoft quality. They they turned off authentication servers for the old Skype.
If the old Skype were still functional today, nobody would say it sucks. OK, maybe no stickers and such.
i realize i haven’t been able to send files for years now because all the p2p platforms have disappeared.
https://lemmy.world/comment/15367515 - yes ; so I think the idea of an IM that could replace it with the functionality normal for it belongs not to the tech realm (all parts solved separately), but to social studies and market studies realm. Somehow there is a technology that has defeated all competition thrown at it, it’s called bittorrent.
The way internet got developed does make you wonder if it could have been done better if it weren’t for grifter class always engineering shit to middle man.
Here is some free cloud boy, enjoy, trust me, I will never sell your data and start charging fees while degrading quality of this great thing.
Skype? Wasn’t this the buggy voice chat?
Yeah, for about a week. It’s been awesome for the 20 years since. I’ve used it on some really shitty internet on a weekly-to-daily basis and I’ve only been amazed at its reliability.
So it stands to reason in 2025 America that we need to destroy something just because it works and works well.
You shoulda tried it. Too bad. It dynamically switched codecs based on congestion, it punched through nats like none before it; it just worked.
None of this “Skype in name” Lync mess.
They just reskinned it and slapped irc in it and called it teams
It also cobbled in groups from Exchange, and the Collab site from SharePoint. Its pretty much three raccoons in a trench-coat.
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(nsfw language)
