Skype started out as a peer to peer VoIP tool. Microsoft who now own Skype turned it into a centralised thing, with unfettered access for the US intelligence services, and further diluted the Skype name with Skype for Business which isn’t Skype at all (and doesn’t interact with ‘consumer’ Skype).
Today on the back text of a book I just bought I came across an endorsement by one of Skype’s founders, and I thought back to the conversation we once had in his living room. That made me ask myself the question:
Are there currently any VoIP software tools for individuals that work peer to peer as Skype was originally envisioned?
Now it maybe an easy question with an obvious answer, and I know there are standards for it out there. But are there any applications out there that implement P2P VoIP? If not, why not? Shouldn’t there be, as when Microsoft subverted Skype, they left a niche didn’t they?
@ton Signal?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29#Servers
Signal (software) – Wikipedia
Signal, as it made clear in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/taking-back-our-privacy, is dogmatically not decentralized.
Nextcloud Talk is P2P-first (https://nextcloud.com/talk/). Unfortunately it’s also, in my experience, somewhat flaky at present, and is focused on use within the enterprise, so although you can use it with “guests” (outsiders), that’s not at all intuitive.
@metbril relies on cemtralised servers afaik
@ton depending on your use case. This was used by Hong Kong protesters. https://bridgefy.me/
Home | Bridgefy
@ton not sure if p2p, but platforms like rocket chat, matrix, Nextcloud talk should all be at least self-hostable.What’s ultimately the goal in your situation?
@ton jitsi is P2P when just 2 people meet. When a 3rd joins, it routes via the Jitsi server.
Sometimes I would come across a blog post that I’d very much like to read the comments on. Like the Skype question, for example. If the post is old, the comments are already there, but if it is new and people are likely to add new comments and thoughts, I’ll need to re-visit the page later to read the new comments. Keeping track of such pages is a pain in the behind.
Luckily, the page linked above has a separate feed that tracks new comments. I can simply subscribe to that feed and read the incoming comments in my feed reader. Great! Every blog should have such an option.
Mine does now, too. Yay!
Бывает, наткнёшься на пост, к которому очень хочется почитать комменты — как к вопросу про Skype, например. Если пост старый, комменты уже там, но если он совсем свежий, комментов и полезных мыслей к нему, вероятно, ещё понапишут, и надо не забыть зайти попозже и их почитать. Очень неудобно.
К счастью, на нормальных сайтах, как в примере по ссылке, есть отдельная лента комментариев к конкретному посту. Можно просто на неё подписаться и получать новые комментарии прямо к себе в читалку. Удобно! Такая опция нужна в каждом блоге.
В моём теперь она тоже есть. Ура!
My blog tells me it’s 18 years ago today I installed Skype and made my first call with Dina Mehta and Stuart Henshall the same day. That was three weeks after Skype launched in public beta. I don’t remember, nor does my blog for me, when my last Skype call was. Sometime after the 2011 Microsoft acquisition for sure. Maybe when they switched from the original peer to peer to a central server model? More likely it was around the time when they confused the world by having Skype and Skype for Business as completely separate things yet using the same name, from the fall of 2016. I uninstalled it by 2019 I think. My meeting and conversation notes mention ‘skype call’ for the last time somewhere during 2015.
Are there any current p2p voip applications that can capture the fascination that Skype held in 2003? Has it gone ‘under the hood’ as a protocol, living in different silos? Or is there an existing ecosystem of apps and users still around? Is Skype p2p voip a thing that could be useful to recreate?
[UPDATE: I should have thought to look for it in my blog: I did ask the same questions about what the Skype of now would be, a little under a year ago.]
A (short) list of applications that were very useful to me at one time, but then went away or astray. The question is, could one redo these in a current and useful way?
Dopplr: showing simple travel plans (city and dates) to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups outside your regular movements. (went away after being acquired)
Delicious: social bookmarking (went astray by dropping/breaking-by-redoing the social functionality, then went away). Have a project on the shelf to redo this for myself, called Linqurator.
Skype: p2p voip (went astray by dropping p2p in favor of centralised servers, after acquisition by Microsoft). See this and this posting asking questions about the current p2p voip space.