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. 🙇
Is this spam? The first recommendation is for an otherwise paid product that has a 100 user limit on the self-hosted option.
It is not spam, and you miss-read it. Prose is an open-source XMPP client. They can set you up (host on your behalf) for free, up to a certain point. You can pay for it (there is a commercial offering), or you can use it unlimited and with no extra costs than your own server’s if you self-host. It’s all being developed there in the open in case you don’t want to take my word for it: https://github.com/prose-im
I’m happy to be more formally corrected, but this is from their pricing page.
Just below you’ll find a section about “self hosting (soon)”, though you can already use it with your own XMPP account as a standalone client (no questions asked), like I do, or, optionally, with the server-side components (opensource prosody module).
Edit: adding https://github.com/prose-im
I don’t see what you’re describing 🤷 Soon only appears once on the page and not in this context for me.
I do notice that the product comparison chart lists the same 100 user limit for self-hosted.
It appears as a tooltip
Anyhow, where I intended to draw your intention was on https://prose.org/downloads
You can just download the client for your platform (assuming one is available), or use the web one (otherwise), or just build one from the sources I linked (which is what I do), and login with your usual XMPP account. Would you need an account and have to decide which provider to register with, this would come handy: https://providers.xmpp.net/
In this set-up, prose.org isn’t hosting your account and will of course let you interact with thousands of users or more, like any other XMPP client.
Oh, prose does? Yikes.
See my other comment: if you already have an XMPP account, prose is just another client that you can use however you like, for free (and at that point, everyone should be having an XMPP account, if you ask me). If you don’t have an account, they can act as service provider (but this being a decentralized network, the don’t want to encourage hosting everyone on the same server).