Rena's Room

Originally Posted 08/09/25

Skype - A Late Eulogy

Skype in its final days, image courtesy of Techspace Africa.

This is a post that was drafted early, and posted late.

Skype was a vile piece of software, one that I never liked, and one that saved my life. As of my original writing, it is 4:40am on the 15th of March, 2025. It's however many weeks away from the shutdown of Skype, I feel the exact number is irrelevant.

The world before Skype was already shrinking at an alarming rate. Skype was originally released in 2003 when the internet was becoming well and truly ubiquitous in everyday life, something unavoidable and vast, something that felt unknowable. Obviously Skype wasn't the first method of global communication available from the home computer. Before Skype people still paraded around multiplayer text-based worlds waging roleplay wars with people on the other side of the earth, there were things like Usenet and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) - but they weren't exactly accessible to the average person. Usenet felt huge to those who knew it, but if you told your coworker about it it would all feel like technobabble. There was a high skill-floor, it was something for those in the know, and if you weren't in the know it didn't really matter to you.

As is to be expected, over time these gated technologies gave way to ones that were more accessible. Communities moved from Usenet to forums on the main stage of the internet, and most IRC users moved to MSN Instant Messenger - and then to something more accessible again. Skype.

More important than what Skype was is what it represented. MSN was more intuitive than IRC, sure - but most of that accessibility came from the fact that so much less initial setup was required. Skype was much sleeker as a package, more intuitive, and this ease of use allowed it to quickly gain a foothold. Any semblance of competition was thoroughly quashed in 2006... because Skype introduced *video* calls. The world was already shrinking with the initial rise of the internet, now all of a sudden your son who had moved to Australia could appear on your monitor and you could engage in something resembling face-to-face conversation.

Skype 2.5 from around 2006, image courtesy of Ubergizmo.

In the early 2010s it found me. Mainly to play Minecraft with some primary school friends, after school every day we'd hop on whatever server we could find (not having any idea how to set up one of our own). Voice chat alone felt revolutionary at that age, but as my life became more steeped in the internet it turned into something far more important.

I was a lonely teenager. I rarely left the house outside of being dragged by the collar to school or the homes of relatives. I had few friends who were interested in visiting, but on Skype I began to make some of the most genuine connections of my life to that point. Not the first, but it damn sure felt it at times. I was a Tumblr teen through and through, and Tumblr at the time didn't have any intuitive messaging system (real ones remember Fan Mail) so if you wanted to chat with a mutual about the latest update to a certain webcomic you had to go to Skype instead, and we did. There were people who were interested in talking to me, in what I had to say. In who I was and who I wanted to become. There was a lot of joy hidden in those days. I remember hearing the voices of friends for the first time. I remember staying up late on call with Lucas, someone I consider a friend to this day. We'd play Animal Crossing together. I take comfort in knowing I'll play the next one with him too.

And yet, with a lot of these friends it's been... somewhere around nine years since last I heard from them. I write this knowing there's no way I'll ever speak to them again. This isn't Skype's fault for shutting down obviously, if it lasted forever we still wouldn't have a way to contact each other because we don't use the thing anymore. That's why it's going. No one does. No, I've had no way to talk to them for years. I'm only feeling that now. I suppose this loss of contact is the real death I lament, belated as it may be. Mourning as I am, I still don't miss those days.

There was joy in that time, but the time was not joyous. It's where I got to know someone that I feel in my heart is dead. It was home to every messy fallout and gore image I was sent. It's where I lay at night until the small hours of the morning begging people not to commit suicide. I'd wonder if anyone would do the same for me. I began to know the sunrise well. I felt like the sun was mocking me.

Right now, in anticipation of the shutdown, I'm thinking about the people I met on Skype that I love to this day. I'm thinking of the people I wish I had talked to more, others I wish I never knew, others whose impact is far too complex for a blogpost I started at 4:40am.

I'm mostly thinking about the people I loved once that I can't ever hear the voice of again.

I stopped using Skype somewhere around the eighth of May, 2016 - at least that's the date Discord says I signed up on. As groundbreaking as Skype was when it came out, it wasn't a pretty site when the 2010s rolled around. I used it as a teen because there was no real alternative that I knew of. What was once sleek and intuitive was now shambling along, slow and grotesque (if you think grotesque is an exaggeration I'd like to remind you of their dancing turkey emoji). When I booted up Discord for the first time there was no going back. You couldn't even call people directly when I originally joined, you had to create a server that just had you and the person you wanted to talk to and go into a voice channel! And it was STILL more intuitive than what Skype had turned itself into.

Thinking back, this switchover came at a fitting time. I was nearly done third year in secondary school. In the Irish education system fourth year is optional, and I sure as hell didn't intend on staying another year - so that September I would be separated from the class I had been with for ten years at that point. Fifth year was the unknown. I was terrified. And it ended up being what one could consider the first "interesting" year of my life. The first one I really lived.

So, beyond the shutdown, why do I want to christen my brand new blog with Skype of all things? I've waxed poetic about my relationship with it, but it's a lot of effort just to put my foot forward with a program that's irrelevant and that I do not like. This isn't just about Skype. This is about how I kinda fucking hate Discord too. It works well and it's my preferred place to message friends, but it serves as a microcosm of everything I dislike about the modern internet. It's time to talk about the death of online communities.

During Skype's reign it was fundamentally incompatible with hosting large communities. If there's too many people in a single chat it turns into an unreadable mess of messages, countless people all talking over each other. For this reason it was supplementary. You could meet people on a forum and then, when it's time for more personal and private discussion, move over to Skype - crucially, while keeping the public-facing forum apart. You did not need Skype installed on your computer to engage with the forum, you didn't need an account to read over the threads if you wanted to read someone's discussion or to get information you need. Skype and any given forum were separate.

But as time went on all of the internet began to homogenise, and Discord had a hand in this. Forums got turned into subreddits, fan-pages became twitter accounts, but most communities, particularly more niche ones, got funneled into Discord and lost their independence in doing so. I can't count the number of times I've found that the resources I've been looking for have been stuck in some Discord server that you have to join for access! My sidebar is flooded with communities that I'm not actually interested in because there's no other way to get updates or assistance with whatever obscure software or game the server is for. When you remember that Discord has largely been used as a Skype replacement this becomes an issue. This feels invasive! Discord is where I primarily talk to close friends, much like how I used skype, and as a result it feels like a very personal environment. I don’t want to let randos that I’m trying to get some files from into that space. Skype, as a result of being separate from most online communities, was a much more curated environment. You were in charge of where people saw you or knew you. If you wanted to keep your life on a forum seperate from anything personal then you could. Discord does not extend this courtesy to you. In 2006 you saw your son in Australia's face as if you were talking in person. In 2025 you see he's in a server for some weird titty games. You worry he'll see you're in there too.

But Discord wasn't entirely made as a replacement for Skype of course and I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that. It wasn't made for keeping in touch with loved ones, it was made to foster community, the communities that flocked to it. Yeah, people stuck with it because it's "like Skype but better", but it wanted to fill a niche that Skype didn't. As I mentioned earlier, Skype's group chats weren't a good environment for conversations between a lot of people, quickly becoming a hectic nightmare after more than eight people were added, and so the Discord server was born. Whereas Skype's group chats were a single stream of conversation, Discord provided multiple channels one could speak in, generally categorised. If you have a Dungeons and Dragons group you might have a general conversation channel, one for working out scheduling, one for art you drew of everyone's characters, etc.

And that seemed perfect for a time. We watched as its candle was gloriously lit. Over time it became a campfire. We would gather around, hold hands, and tell our stories. It was our place, our reprieve from the woods around us. None of us noticed when the trees caught alight.

Discord was born to foster communities, but in the end it's just taken away the individuality, the freedom. The expression. It’s the same with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit - small communities are eaten by the large and their bones are spat back out.

In the ongoing homogenisation of the internet there comes a point where you need to decide you're sick of visiting the same five sites and the same sixty Discord servers. I got to that point at least, so here we are. This is my website. Not my account, not my server. I have found my own corner of the internet where I can do and express myself as I please.

I encourage you to do the same.

Consider this an official statement as to why I won't be joining the Discord server where you host your Sims 2 Enhanced Eyeball Textures mod.