Empathy and Advice Welcomed Skype will shut down forever in May

I'm having a hard time with that tonight. If you search this site for "skype" you will find mostly posts by me, at least from the last few years. Almost no one uses it anymore, which I guess is why they're finally shutting it down.

If you're like me, you've spent a lot of time talking to people and making friends online instead of making friends in the real world. I never socialized in real life between my early teens and my late twenties. I only had online friendships. Skype is where I kept the majority of those friendships while I've been socially isolated. I got it over a decade ago, and while spending all day alone in the real world, I would chat every day with my internet friends on Skype, share how my day went, ask about theirs, talk about everything and nothing, movies and games and mental health issues and life events. We would bond, connect.

Currently I only have one person on there that I chat with (a girl I know IRL), I asked to chat on there out of old habit. But I used to have contacts on there that haven't been online for years, from long before meeting people in real life seemed possible for me. They either faded away, or we fell out. People I would chat with all day every day, share everything with. I didn't know how much they meant to me until they were gone. I still have them in my contacts. Most haven't been online in years, some deleted me, some I deleted.

Yet I still use it every day, and have used it every day even when I haven't had anyone to chat with on there. I made groups with only me in them, where I wrote notes from classes when I went to uni, planned trips, wrote rough drafts of forum posts, and, recently, chatted with Copilot. And all of those old friends would still be in my contact list, and they still are. And they're finally about to be gone forever. It makes me sad, especially tonight.
I know you can download your chat logs and view them in your browser or other programs, but they won't look the same. The emojis won't be there, the pictures and videos we sent each other won't be there.

It feels like an old friend is dying. Like I'll lose a big part of my life from these past 11 years, a part of my identity, my story.

I'm thinking of, in late April, sending a last message to all my old friends on there, the ones that I haven't deleted and who haven't deleted me. To say goodbye, and that I still miss them sometimes.

I'm sorry that something that you've relied on so much for social contact for so long is going away. Hopefully there will be some other methods that you can use to stay in touch with people there that you care about.

That sounds good. Maybe you could even send a message before that to make sure they get it before Skype shuts down. Could you give them some other way to contact you like email, phone, facebook, etc.?

Thank you
The one person I still talk to on there, I can talk to other places. The rest have been offline for years, and they've probably forgotten Skype exists, so sending them my contact details would be useless. The goodbye messages would just me for my own sake

Oh wow no way? I felt like this when we lost MSN messenger. I started to use Skype after that but I have not used it in years. End of an era

That sucks
I think discord is much more fun personally
Maybe give it a go
You can bond with people easier I think, since you can join groups around a subject you are all passionate about
Like a video game, religion, hobby etc
Smaller servers are better for getting to know people
Big servers feels like watching a popular stream, where you can barely read the chat, since its going so fast

I used Skype a lot also, but not to worry. You can download "Teams" the program that is replacing Skype. You can transfer your contacts from Skype to Teams easily and continue. Teams is is just a better Skype.

teams.microsoft.com
https://teams.microsoft.com › edustart

I disagree that teams is better than skype I don't think teams will catch on for private use, it's something we used at work when I worked an office job. And I can't stand Discord, it's too chaotic and, like so much of the internet these days, it just moves too fast, people comment on one thing you say and then you never hear from them again, while someone can come in and change the subject at any time and bury your message.

Today is the last day of Skype...the platform where all my friendships/close connections took place in my 20s. I don't think anyone will understand why I'm taking this so seriously, most other people didn't have the same experience. I sent goodbye messages to all those able to receive them, friends I haven't talked to in many years. I know they won't be read. But I still find myself wishing that, on the last day of Skype, I receive new messages from old friends on there.

I did join Teams just to preserve my chats, so they won't go away entirely, but several of them just say "unknown user" (that would be those that haven't been on Skype for a decade, I suppose), and the ones that have usernames and profile pictures will probably cease to have those when the deadline for transfering accounts passes.

I am nostalgia incarnate, you see. I miss people who have been gone for a long, long time whenever I'm alone for too long at a time. Being with friends alleviates that, so I've decided to travel and visit a real life friend later this month. In the meantime, this is going to hurt.

Speaking of that friend. She was the last person I received a Skype message from, a month ago, before we moved over to whatsapp. After I saw on reddit that Skype had now officially shut down tonight (or last night, really, since it's almost morning now), I sent her a message, "test". It still worked on my PC, but didn't anymore when I turned it back on after a walk.

Hours after Skype was gone on my pc, I got a notification from Teams, which I kept open to make it all easier to deal with, seeing as my old conversations have been carried over. It was from this friend, and it turned out she had sent it on Skype; I got the notification on my phone. It still works on mobile...at least until the next time we turn off and on our phones, or it updates automatically. I'm glad the last message I received there wasn't a month ago. I've felt so alone these last 24 hours as I've sent goodbye messages to everyone who had been gone for years, and I was the only one with the green light next to my name signifying that I'm online.

I'm glad that, after I thought it was gone forever, and I felt so alone, I got to chat with a friend on there one last time, someone else shone green with me. I'm really broken up about this in a way that other people just won't understand and I needed the night to end with feeling less alone.

Skype was pretty much killed by Microsoft. It was turned into a corporate thing when they bought it. Back then it was just what you used before Discord and Kik (and the less said about Kik the better) but it's been dropping users like flies for awhile and I feel like Zoom was one of the things that killed it too. Skype could've had staying power, had Microsoft not transformed it into something that wasn't. It's sad to see that it's now just one of those things from the good era of the internet that just doesn't exist anymore.