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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology.

It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite the experience).

It was also available literally everywhere: Linux, the Sony PSP, Nokia's Linux-based "internet appliance/tablet" series, Symbian smartphones, cordless landline phones in some countries...

I've long since moved on, but I do have some very fond memories of it being a lifeline to friends and family when backpacking and studying abroad in a time of horrendously expensive international/roaming calls.

Rest in peace!

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Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.

2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

P2P was such an interesting part of internet history. It's a shame client-server prevailed over it.

Decentralized systems are so much more liberating. It felt like being a part of something rather than being a serf in someone's platform.

>2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.

This. The tech works and is great. But it's not in the interests of the megacorps that took over from 2008ish onwards.

Well that and people seem to really enjoy (or at least feel compelled to use) social networks.

Social networks tend to be pretty difficult in p2p systems since the amount of traffic usually scales exponentially with network size (as posts get published to followers and shared over and over by the users of the network), which you’d want to maximize

I don't buy it. DHT systems have mechanisms to handle hotspots in the network.

There’s nothing to buy.

Say I have 100 followers and each of them have 100 followers.

Then say I make a post and all of my followers repost it.

That’s an explosion of updates that need to be sent around for 101 interactions.

These major social media platforms handle millions of interactions per second with accounts that have millions of followers and posts that get hundreds of thousands of reposts.

When there’s a centralized system, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets all their posts. Very little need to propagate every single update across every node in your whole network. From a user standpoint it’s seamless as well

It’s nothing unsolvable, but it’s much harder than a centralized social media platform while providing no visible benefit for the average, non technical, user.

What would you recommend these days? All I know is 2000s software like Shareaza, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc.

As a P2P Skype alternative, there are: Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat).

qBittorrent, any public tracker (pirate bay is still alive and well) or query the DHT directly using BTDigg for bonus points.

I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.

I wonder why NAT hole punching techniques never took off much with P2P, it seems like with enough work getting around NAT most of the time would be possible.

Good, reliable ways to do hole punching were not available until relatively late (STUN, ICE) and were somewhat finicky for a long time, especially on crappy routers.

Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable

You can't hole punch on mobile. Most mobile networks use symmetric NATs unfortunately.

Jini may be an example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini

I remember Bill Venners used to write about it on his site artima.com .

> It was also available literally everywhere

I remember trying to run SkypeKit on my Kindle. Didn’t get it to make calls, but I think it received chat messages!

> before Microsoft's corporate hug of death

Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.

> It was also available literally everywhere

Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?

> Rest in peace!

Justice for Skype!

Skype was founded 2003, wholly bought by eBay in 2005. MS bought it from eBay in 2011, when Skype had 30m users, which was and is tiny compared to relevant markets for videoconferencing. Even now Teams has around 30% of the market. In the 14 years since the purchase MS increased Skype usage significantly and brought the tech to a vastly bigger audience.

So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.

but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product

I wish that were true. Every enterprise I've seen has thrown their hands up and said "we already use microsoft for everything else (generally email, ad, or office) and teams is bundled why would we use anything else". So instead of getting good chat and VoIP apps, the decision makers just stick with the cheapest option (Teams, they're already paying for it in one of their tens of other Microsoft subscriptions)

Compared to the rubbish that is MS accounts or email, teams is outright awesome compared to it's competitors! At least you don't get logged out of your email app and don't get notifications or any indication until you dig deep into what's going on (let's not even talk about how agonizingly slow outlook is). Or the rubbish of having to dig 3 levels down into the settings to get outlooks 2fa token (good look if the aforementioned lock out happened). I could go on. I seriously don't understand how companies would go with this rubbish (especially for shops which use Linux for a large fraction of their dev machines).

Didn’t MSFT recently uncouple teams license from O365? I think you now need a separate license to use business teams, but also why use anything else.

Yes, they did. They were forced by the eu commission to do so as bundling teams was an anti-competitive practice, similar to when Microsoft bundled internet explorer into windows, effectively killing the market for web browsers.

That they failed to successfully profit from their crime does not obviate it from being criminal. Skype was created in 2003, I do hope it's appreciated how much smaller the market was back then, on top of how bandwidth constrained it was.

On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.

In a personal setting? You may be right.

In a corporate setting? "We already have Microsoft accounts for all of our users, do you want us to maintain a separate user list? No way. Teams may be bad, but it's not bad enough to warrant that."

Some corporates, yes. Many others, no. A true sign there's no monopoly here, just regular old vendor lock in.

> teams is so objectively bad

What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.

I worked at a company that used teams a few years ago, after an acquisition. I'd routinely not get notifications for DMs and other important messages. The devops guy was trying to figure out how to port our slack prod errors channel to teams. I felt bad for him. Can't remember if he ever succeeded.

I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).

Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat) are better, being P2P and open source.

Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

> Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

They are working hard now on the Extinguish phase. Linux was set back by systemd and wayland. And what's left of it is available as WSL.

Monopoly? My god man get a grip.

Thank you for this thorough analysis.

Smart phones killed Skypes rich P2P. Then Microsoft added permanent nodes too little too late. The synching was awful on mobile too. The app would lock up waiting to download every single chatlog going back years. Just download the last ten and quietly download the rest in a separate thread.

Microsoft was not fast moving enough to keep Skype at its prime.

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