Crucially though, for a very long time they forced you to choose a server instead of just set you up on the default on.

I’m not saying don’t federate. I’m saying don’t talk about that as the primary feature when you’re enticing people to sign up to it.

Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.

I didn’t. Thanks for the shoutout, I’ll have a look.

You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.

Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.

Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.

Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.

I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.

Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.

In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.

Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.

The only thing we can hope for is that Musk is dumb enough to volunteer to be “apprehended” by ED209. He strikes me as having that much techno-optimism (also see: Steel ball against Cybertruck window).

Yeah, don’t for a second think this wasn’t part of the deal he made with Musk.

I don’t quite understand how this is an issue.

I mean personally I’m happy with anonymised ads from DDG in return for anonymised Bing searches (+their own guffins) but I think it’s fair enough, if you really want to see no ads, that some turn to Kagi.

Speaking as a Dane, where Halloween has invaded in the last 20 years, basically to replace Fastelavn, the traditional spring-based festival of trick or treating, just another excuse for selling stuff.

You’ll be able to fit a finger under it I bet.

Yes 100% that. I’ve never met a dentist who didn’t immediately tell me to rinse before brushing on hearing I used mouthwash; they all categorically said not to do it after brushing.

Your own happiness is more important that somebody else’s happiness.

Not to say you shouldn’t be nice or help people, or invest in other people’s growth.

But don’t do it to the detriment of your own.

Man good dental hygiene is one of those things you just do not think about until you’re older. Flossing, interdental, mouth wash (before brushing), regularly visiting the hygienist and dentist. Your teeth evolved to last 35-ish years, the rest only happens from hygiene.

Cry.

Depends on where you live. Many places you can’t trust the government and they know almost nothing about you.

In Scandinavia every citizen has a registration number and the government has deployed state-enforced online digital identity system.

It’s not a privacy nightmare if you can trust the government. And in Scandinavia you generally can.

I admire your commitment to this. I’m onboard. Fuck em, take smaller bites.