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Comment by xevb3k | Hacker News Reader

What’s a good alternative, that has native apps for Mac/Windows/iOS/Android, and isn’t attached to a social network?

(Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)

For VOIP I've just been using TeamSpeak3. I'd prefer mumble, but TS3 is more user friendly and running a server on a cheap VPS is simple. No callouts/phone numbers though, pure VOIP, and probably hard to get a customer to join a TS3 server if you try using it professionally. But imo gaming VOIP is miles ahead of everything else, because gaming has relied on it for a long time.

None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.

For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect shrugs.

I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.

Hey, I looked into your HN profile but there is no contact info. I'd like to get in touch with you. I am working on a side project, to offer VoIP (Matrix, XMPP, SIP) and social media hosting services. When pitching the idea to people, network effects are indeed cited as the issue to solve. I am trying to provide an answer by selling package plans, basically as a means for enabling the privacy-aware people to help bring their contacts/friends/family along.

Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)

So far, it’s clear from the replies there isn’t really an alternative with a similar feature set. I guess this is why Skype persists (anyone what to start up an alternative? :)).

There are plenty alternatives what sucks is that there are too many of them and having 20 applications just to fucking chat with people is awful.

I’ve not seen an idea suggested that solves all the issues Skype does in one package, and doesn’t add other baggage.

To be fair, Skype also appears to be trying to add a lot of baggage too.

Check out Dialpad (https://dialpad.com) - it has native apps for all the platforms that you listed, and no attachment to social networks. You will also receive a phone number.

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.

Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Dialpad.

Page opens to geoip set language with no obvious way to change it... so I gave up.

Not sure what you mean by this? Where are you based? The language can be set in the top left corner.

Slack/discord.

> native

FYI, Skype is no longer native either. They killed off beautiful native clients and replaced them with Electron shit.

I'm still using the native client, which really isn't all that bad. But the new one is horrendous.

The native (they called it "Classic" on the download page) is no longer available for download. I found this out the hard way.

>>>I found this out the hard way.

Lesson learned. Stallman up and stop relying on proprietary systems that spy on you and cooperate with murderous regimes.

Being proprietary had nothing to do with it.

They made a technical decision to shelve/bin their native desktop app code, in favour of Electron.

There are 5K public repos on GitHub alone that match a search for "Electron" are they all spying on me and cooperating with murderous regimes?

Gnome3 made technical decision to use JavaScript, but users revolted and forked Gnome2 written in C (now: Mate). Gnome is free software, while Skype is proprietary. Skype users have no right to revolt.

Discord has apps for Windows/Android/iOS/Linux, as well as a surprisingly good web interface. I've switched over completely from Skype and been consistently impressed.

Unsure if you can buy a number but we have found Google Voice a good replacement, at least in terms of ability to make cheap phone calls.

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