Comment on What went wrong with Skype?
Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Cant read the article due to paywall, but, nothing “went wrong” with skype, it was and has always been utter trash. Just having your username leaked was a security breach. Skype’s only merit was it was the first easy to use video calling platform that combined text, audio and streaming in one.
Theres a reason why it was so easy to move my friends group off skype to discord right when discord launched, but I havent been able to convince that same group to move from discord.
Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.
It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.
Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn’t access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.
Wasn’t Skype the best audio/video protocol at the time? Everything else around it was terrible, but I remember that skype was the only voice call software that worked well for me on shitty connection back in the day.
My memory says that both vent and teamspeak were way better for audio, but this was also a time where no one had a mic remotely close to the average you get today. Video, yes. But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
It’s so long ago that my memory might fail me. Skype didn’t need a hosted server and that made it accessible.
But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn’t know what’s reliable offline messages and message history, so there’s that).
Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.
This essentially. It was an easy voice and more importantly videocall software that was free. There were alternatives for text (ICQ, AIM) which were nice and everyone ahd them, and voice (Teamspeak, Mumble) which were either not free or you had to host them yourself and neither did Videocalls. So you begrugingly had a skype account too.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 year ago
archive.today/OLGZq