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Skype Is Down. What Next?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#12
post #9

Thats why i like decentralised messaging (XMPP/Jabber). If a Jabber server goes down, it only affects the users on that particular server, not all users worldwide.

Technically, XMPP is federated (like SMTP) rather than decentralized (like Kademlia).

Point about single-server downtime still stands, of course.

Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#13

Tox is a Free Software project whose goal is to free users from the grip of Proprietary instant messengers like Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29

Why have free alternatives to Skype not taken off? What's missing? It's just a 2 way video stream, right?

Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#15
post #13

Tox is a Free Software project whose goal is to free users from the grip of Proprietary instant messengers like Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29

Why have free alternatives to Skype not taken off? What's missing? It's just a 2 way video stream, right?

Users. Skype is the replacement for MSN Messenger, which people just used for chatting with friends.

Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#16

https://appear.in is free and does not require any installs or account creation. (disclaimer: I'm an engineer at appear.in)

What's your source of revenue? That needs to be clear before we can comfortably use a service for business purposes.

Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#17
It's not easy to make a peer to peer system that can get past most corporate firewalls.

So Skype is more complex than you'd guess.

Your best bet is something using WebRTC.

Re: Skype Is Down. What Next?

#18
post #13

Tox is a Free Software project whose goal is to free users from the grip of Proprietary instant messengers like Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29

Why have free alternatives to Skype not taken off? What's missing? It's just a 2 way video stream, right?

NAT / Firewalls cause a lot of issues. Peer to peer data isn't as straightforward as you'd expect.

The Skype people actually came from Kazaa, so they had a lot of experience with sending peer data across corporate / educational firewalls.

WebRTC is trying to generalize the technology, but it's new.

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